(London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), Intro,
Part I, Part II and Conclusion

INTRODUCTION

THIS study is an attempt
to show that concurrently with the liberal type of democracy there emerged
from the same premises in the eighteenth century a trend towards what we
propose to call the totalitarian type of democracy. These two currents have
existed side by side ever since the eighteenth century. The tension between
them has constituted an important chapter in modern history, and has now
become the most vital issue of our time. It would of course be an
exaggeration to suggest that the whole of the period can be summed up in
terms of this conflict. Nevertheless it was always present, although
usually confused and obscured by other issues, which may have seemed clearer
to contemporaries, but viewed from the standpoint of the present day seem
incidental and even trivial. Indeed, from the vantage point of the mid
twentieth century the history of the last hundred and fifty years looks like
a systematic preparation for the headlong collision between empirical and
liberal democracy on the one hand, and totalitarian Messianic democracy on
the other, in which the world crisis of to-day consists.

(I) THE TWO TYPES OF DEMOCRACY, LIBERAL AND TOTALITARIAN

The essential difference between the two schools of democratic thought as
they have evolved is not, as is often alleged, in the affirmation of the
value of liberty by one, and its denial by the other. It is in their
different attitudes to politics. The liberal approach assumes politics to be
a matter of trial and error, and regards political systems as pragmatic
contrivances of human ingenuity and spontaneity. It also recognizes a variety
of levels of personal and collective endeavour, which are altogether outside
the sphere of politics. The totalitarian democratic school, on the other
hand, is based upon the assumption of a sole and exclusive truth in politics.
It may be called political Messianism in the sense that it postulates a
preordained, harmonious and perfect scheme of things, to which men are
irresistibly driven, and at which they are bound to arrive. It recognizes
ultimately only one plane of existence, the political. It widens the scope of
politics to embrace the whole of human existence. It treats all human thought
and action as having social significance, and therefore as falling within the
orbit of political action. Its political ideas are not a set of pragmatic
precepts or a body of devices applicable to a special branch of human
endeavour. They are an integral part of an all-embracing and coherent
philosophy. Politics is defined as the art of applying this philosophy to the
organization of society, and the final purpose of politics is only achieved
when this philosophy reigns supreme over all fields of life.

Both schools affirm the supreme value of liberty. But whereas one finds
the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other
believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute
collective purpose. It is outside our scope to decide whether liberal
democracy has the faith that totalitarian democracy claims to have in final
aims. What is beyond dispute is that the final aims of liberal democracy have
not the same concrete character. They are conceived in rather negative terms,
and the use of force for their realization is considered as an evil. Liberal
democrats believe that in the absence of coercion men and society may one day
reach through a process of trial and error a state of ideal harmony. In the
case of totalitarian democracy, this state is precisely defined, and is
treated as a matter of immediate urgency, a challenge for direct action, an
imminent event. The problem that arises for totalitarian democracy, and which
is one of the main subjects of this study, may be called the paradox of
freedom. Is human freedom compatible with an exclusive pattern of social
existence, even if this pattern aims at the maximum of social justice and
security ? The paradox of totalitarian democracy is in its insistence that
they are compatible. The purpose it proclaims is never presented as an
absolute idea, external and prior to man. It is thought to be immanent in
man's reason and will, to constitute the fullest satisfaction of his true
interest, and to be the guarantee of his freedom. This is the reason why the
extreme forms of popular sovereignty became the essential concomitant of this
absolute purpose. From the difficulty of reconciling freedom with the idea of
an absolute purpose spring all the particular problems and antinomies of
totalitarian democracy. This difficulty could only be resolved by thinking
not in terms of men as they are, but as they were meant to be, and would be,
given the proper conditions. In so far as they are at variance with the
absolute ideal they can be ignored, coerced or intimidated into conforming,
without any real violation of the democratic principle being involved. In the
proper conditions, it is held, the conflict between spontaneity and duty
would disappear, and with it the need for coercion. The practical question
is, of course, whether constraint will disappear because all have learned to
act in harmony, or because all opponents have been eliminated.

(2) THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORIGINS OF POLITICAL MESSIANISM; THE SCHISM

Enough has been said already to indicate that totalitarian democracy will
be treated in these pages as an integral part of the Western tradition. It is
vital to add that much of the totalitarian democratic attitude was contained
in the original and general eighteenth century pattern of thought. The
branching out of the two types of democracy from the common stem took place
only after the common beliefs had been tested in the ordeal of the French Revolution.
From the point of view of this study the most important change that occurred
in the eighteenth century was the peculiar state of mind which achieved
dominance in the second part of the century. Men were gripped by the idea
that the conditions, a product of faith, time and custom, in which they and
their forefathers had been living, were unnatural and had all to be replaced
by deliberately planned uniform patterns, which would be natural and
rational. This was the result of the decline of the traditional order in
Europe: religion lost its intellectual as well as its emotional hold;
hierarchical feudalism disintegrated under the impact of social and economic
factors; and the older conception of society based on status came to be
replaced by the idea of the abstract, individual man. The rationalist idea
substituted social utility for tradition as the main criterion of social
institutions and values. It also suggested a form of social determinism, to
which men are irresistibly driven, and which they are bound to accept one
day. It thus postulated a single valid system, which would come into
existence when every- 1 thing not accounted for by reason and utility had
been removed. This idea was, of course, bound to clash with the inveterate
irrational ability of man's ways, his likings and attachments. The decline of
religious authority implied the liberation of man's conscience, but it also
implied something else. Religious ethics had to be speedily replaced by
secular, social morality. With the rejection of the Church, and of
transcendental justice, the State remained the sole source and sanction of
morality. This was a matter of great importance, at a time when politics were
considered indistinguishable from ethics. The decline of the idea of status
consequent on the rise o f individualism spelt the doom of privilege, but
also contained totalitarian potentialities. If, as will be argued in this
essay, empiricism is the ally of freedom, and the doctrinaire spirit is the
friend of totalitarianism, the idea of man as an abstraction, independent of
the historic groups to which he belongs, is likely to become a powerful
vehicle of totalitarianism. These three currents merged into the idea of a
homogeneous society, in which men live upon one exclusive plane of existence.
There were no longer to be different levels of social life, such as the
temporal and the transcendental, or membership of a class and citizenship.
The only recognized standard of judgment was to be social utility, as
expressed in the idea of the general good, which was spoken of as if it were
a visible and tangible objective. The whole of virtue was summed up as
conformity to the rationalist, natural pattern. In the past it was possible
for the State to regard many things as matters for God and the Church alone.
The new State could recognize no such limitations. Formerly, men lived in
groups. A man had to belong to some group, and could belong to several at the
same time. Now there was to be only one framework for all activity: the
nation. The eighteenth century never distinguished clearly between the sphere
of personal self-expression and that of social action. The privacy of
creative experience and feeling, which is the salt of freedom, was in due
course to be swamped by the pressure of the permanency assembled people,
vibrating with one collective emotion. The fact that eighteenth-century
thinkers were ardent prophets of liberty and the rights of man is so much
taken for granted that it scarcely needs to be mentioned. But what must be
emphasized is the intense preoccupation of the eighteenth century with the
idea of virtue, which was nothing if not conformity to the hoped-for pattern
of social harmony. They refused to envisage the conflict between liberty and
virtue as inevitable. On the contrary, the inevitable equation of liberty
with virtue and reason was the most cherished article of their faith. When
the eighteenth-century secular religion came face to face with this conflict,
the result was the great schism. Liberal democracy flinched from the spectre
of force, and fell back upon the trial-and-error philosophy. Totalitarian
Messianism hardened into an exclusive doctrine represented by a vanguard of
the enlightened, who justified themselves in the use of coercion against
those who refused to be free and virtuous. The other cause for this fissure,
certainly no less important, was the question of property. The original
impulse of political Messianism was not economic, but ethical and political.
However radical in their theoretical premises, most eighteenth-century
thinkers shrunk from applying the principle of total renovation to the sphere
of economics and property. It was however extremely difficult to theorize
about a rational harmonious social order, with contradictions resolved,
anti-social impulses checked, and man's desire for happiness satisfied, while
leaving the field of economic endeavour to be dominated by established facts
and interests, man's acquisitive spirit and chance. Eighteenth-century
thinkers became thus involved in grave inconsistencies, which they attempted
to cover with all kinds of devices. The most remarkable of these certainly
was the Physiocratic combination of absolutism in politics with the
laissez-faire theory in economics, which claimed that the free, unhampered
economic pursuits of men would set themselves into a harmonious pattern, in
accordance with the laws of demand and supply. But before the eighteenth
century had come to an end, the inner logic of political Messianism,
precipitated by the Revolutionary upheaval, its hopes, its lessons and its
disappointments, converted the secular religion of the eighteenth century
from a mainly ethical into a social and economic doctrine, based on ethical
premises. The postulate of salvation, implied in the idea of the natural order,
came to signify to the masses stirred by the Revolution a message of social
salvation before all. And so the objective ideal of social harmony gave place
to the yearnings and strivings of a class; the principle of virtuous liberty
to the passion for security. The possessing classes, surprised and frightened
by the social dynamism of the idea of the natural order, hastened to shake
off the philosophy which they had earlier so eagerly embraced as a weapon in
their struggle against feudal privilege. The Fourth Estate seized it from
their hands, and filled it with new meaning. And so the ideology of the
rising bourgeoisie was transformed into that of the proletariat. | The object
of this book is to examine the stages through which the social ideals of the
eighteenth century were transformed-on one side-into totalitarian democracy.
These stages are taken to be three: the eighteenth-century postulate, the
Jacobin improvisation, and the Babouvist crystallization; all leading up to
the emergence of economic communism on the one hand, and to the synthesis of
popular sovereignty and single-party dictatorship on the other. The three
stages constitute the three parts into which this study is divided. The
evolution of the liberal type of democracy is outside its scopes Modern
totalitarian democracy is a dictatorship resting on popular enthusiasm, and
is thus completely different from absolute power wielded by a divine-right
King, or by a usurping tyrant. In so far as it is a dictatorship based on
ideology and the enthusiasm of the masses, it is the outcome, as will be
shown, of the synthesis between the eighteenth-century idea of the natural
order and the Rousseauist idea of popular fulfillment and self-expression. By
means of this synthesis rationalism was made into a passionate faith.
Rousseau's " general will ", an ambiguous concept, sometimes
concocted as valid a priori, sometimes as immanent in the will of man,
exclusive and implying unanimity, became the driving force of totalitarian
democracy, and the source of all its contradictions and antinomies. These are
to be examined in detail.

(3) TOTALITARIANISM OF THE RIGHT AND TOTALITARIANISM OF THE LEFT

The emphasis of this theory is always upon Man. And here is the
distinguishing mark between totalitarianism of the Left, with which this
study is concerned, and totalitarianism of the Right. While the
starting-point of totalitarianism of the Left has been and ultimately still
is man, his reason and salvation, that of the Right totalitarian schools has
been the collective entity, the State, the nation, or the race. The former
trend remains essentially individualist, atomistic and rationalist even when
it raises the class or party to the level of absolute ends. These are, after
all, only mechanically formed groups. Totalitarians of the Right operate
solely with historic, racial and organic entities, concepts altogether alien
to individualism and rationalism. That is why totalitarian ideologies of the
Left always are inclined to assume the character of a universal creed, a tendency
which totalitarianism of the Right altogether lacks. For reason is a unifying
force, presupposing mankind to be the sum total of individual reasoning
beings. Totalitarianism of the Right implies the negation of such a unity as
well as a denial of the universality of human values. It represents a special
form of pragmatism. Without raising the question of the absolute significance
of the professed tenets, it aspires to a mode of existence, in which the
faculties of man may-in a deliberately limited circumference of space, time
and numbers-be stirred, asserted and realized so as to enable him to have
what is nowadays called a wholly satisfying experience in a collective elan,
quickened by mass emotion and the impact of impressive exploits; in brief, the
myth. The second vital difference between the two types of totalitarianism is
to be found in their divergent conceptions of human nature. The Left
proclaims the essential goodness and perfectibility of human nature. The
Right declares man to be weak and corrupt. Both may preach the necessity of
coercion. The Right teaches the necessity of force as a permanent way of
maintaining order among poor and unruly creatures, and training them to act
in a manner alien to their mediocre nature. Totalitarianism of the Left, when
resorting to force, does so in the conviction that force is used only in
order to quicken the pace of man's progress to perfection and social harmony.
It is thus legitimate to use the term democracy in reference to
totalitarianism of the Left. The term could not be applied to totalitarianism
of the Right. It may be said that these are distinctions that make little
difference, especially where results are concerned. It may further be
maintained that whatever their original premises were, totalitarian parties
and regimes of the Left have invariably tended to degenerate into soulless
power machines, whose lip service to the original tenets is mere hypocrisy.
Now, this is a question not only of academic interest, but of much practical
importance. Even if we accept this diagnosis of the nature of Left
totalitarianism when triumphant, are we to attribute its degeneration to the
inevitable process of corrosion which an idea undergoes when power falls into
the hands of its adherents ? Or should we seek the reason for it deeper,
namely in the very essence of the contradiction between ideological
absolutism and individualism, inherent in modern political Messianism ? When
the deeds of men in power belie their words, are they to be called hypocrites
and cynics or are they victims of an intellectual delusion ? Here is one of
the questions to be investigated. This essay is not concerned with the
problem of power as such, only with that of power in relation to
consciousness. The objective forces favoring the concentration of power and
the subordination of the individual to a power machine, such as modern
methods of production and the arcane imperil offered by modern technical
developments, are outside the scope of this work. The political tactics of
totalitarian parties and systems, or the blueprints of social positivist
philosophies for the human hive, will be considered not for their own sake,
but in their bearing on man's awareness and beliefs. What is vital for the
present investigation is the human element: the thrill of fulfillment
experienced by the believers in a modern Messianic movement, which makes them
experience submission as deliverance; the process that goes on in the minds
of the leaders, whether in soliloquy or in public discussion, when faced with
the question of whether their acts are the self-expression of the Cause or
their own willful deeds; the stubborn faith that as a result of proper social
arrangements and education, the conflict between spontaneity and the
objective pattern will ultimately be resolved by the acceptance of the
latter, without any sense of coercion.

(4) SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS MESSIANISM

The modern secular religion of totalitarian democracy has had unbroken
continuity as a sociological force for over a hundred and fifty years. Both
aspects, its continuity and its character as a sociological force, need
stressing. These two essential features permit us to ignore the isolated
literary ventures into Utopia in the earlier centuries, without denying the
influence of Plato, Thomas More or Campanella upon men like Rousseau,
Diderot, Mably, or Sam-Just and Buonarroti.- If one were in search of
antecedents, one would also have to turn to the various outbursts of chiliasm
in the Middle Ages and in the Reformation, especially to the extreme wing of
the Puritan Revolution in seventeenth-century England. The coexistence of
liberal democracy and revolutionary Messianism m modern times could
legitimately be compared to the relationship between the official Church and
the eschatological revolutionary current in Christianity during the ages of
faith. Always flowing beneath the surface of official society, the Christian
revolutionary current burst forth from time to time in the form of movements
of evangelical poverty, heretical sects, and social-religious revolts. Like
the two major trends of the modern era, the Church and the rebels against it
derived their ideas from the same source. The heterodox groups were, however,
too ardent in their literal interpretation of God's word. They refused to come
to terms with the flesh and the kingdom of this world, and were unwilling to
overcome the ideal of a society of saints to the exclusively transcendental
plane. There were, however, vital differences between the chiliastic
movements of the earlier centuries and modern political Messianism. The
former were only sporadic occurrences, although the tension from which they
sprang was always latent. A flame burst forth and was soon totally
extinguished, or rendered harmless to society at large. The crisis might leave
behind a sect. The myth might survive and perhaps rekindle a spark in some
remote place and at some later date. Society as a whole went on much as
before, although not quite free from the fear and mental discomfort left by
the conflagration, and not wholly immune to the influence of the new sect.
There was however a fundamental principle in pre-eighteenth century chiliasm
that made it impossible for it to play the part of modern political
Messianism. It was its religious essence. This explains why the Messianic
movements or spasms of the earlier type invariably ended by breaking away
from society, and forming sects based upon voluntary adherence and community
of experience. Modern Messianism has always aimed at a revolution in society
as a whole. The driving power of the sects was the Word of God, and the hope
of achieving salvation by facing God alone and directly, without the aid of
intermediary powers or submission to them, whether spiritual or temporal, and
yet as part of a society of equal saints. This ideal is not unlike the modern
expectation of a 3] society of men absolutely free and equal, and yet acting
in spontaneous and perfect accord. In spite of this superficial similarity,
the differences between the two altitudes are fundamental. Although the
Christian revolutionaries fought for the individual's freedom to interpret
God's word, their sovereign was not man, but God. ~ They aimed at personal
salvation and an egalitarian society based I on the Law of Nature, because
they had it from God that there lies salvation, and believed that obedience
to God is the condition of human freedom. The point of reference of modern
Messianism, on the other hand, is man's reason and will, and its aim
happiness on earth, achieved by a social transformation. The point of
reference is temporal, but the claims are absolute. It is thus a remarkable
fact that the Christian revolutionaries, with few exceptions, notably
Calvin's Geneva and Anabaptist Munster, shrunk from the use I of force to
impose their own pattern, in spite of their belief in its divine source and
authority, while secular Messianism, starting with a point of reference in
time, has developed a fanatical resolve to make its doctrine rule absolutely
and everywhere. The reasons are not far to seek. Even if the Monistic
principle of religious Messianism had succeeded in dominating and reshaping
society the result would still have been fundamentally different from the
situation created by modern political " absolutism". Society might
have been forbidden the compromises which are made possible by the Orthodox
distinction between the kingdom of God and the earthly State, and as a
consequence social and political arrangements might have lost much of their
flexibility. The sweep towards the enforcement, of an exclusive pattern would
nevertheless have been hampered, if not by the thought of the fallibility of
man, at least by the consciousness that life on earth is not a closed circle,
but has its continuation and conclusion in eternity. Secular Messianic Monism
is subject to no such restraints. It demands that the whole account be
settled here and now. The extreme wing of English Puritanism at the time of
the Cromwellian Revolution still bore the full imprint of religious
eschatology. It had already acquired modern features however, It combined
extreme individualism with socia radicalism and a totalitarian temperament.
Nevertheless this movement, far from initiating the continuous current of
modern political Messianism, remained from the European point of view an isolated
episode. It was apparently quite unknown to the early representatives of the
movement under discussion. While eighteenth-century French thinkers and
revolutionary leaders were alive to the political lessons of the "
official " Cromwellian Revolution as a deterrent against military
dictatorship, and a writer like Harrington was respected as a master, it is
doubtful whether the more radical aspects of the English Revolution were much
known or exercised any influence in France before the nineteenth century. The
strongest influence on the fathers of totalitarian democracy was that of
antiquity, interpreted in their own way. Their myth of antiquity was the
image of liberty equated with virtue. The citizen of Sparta or Rome was
proudly free, yet a marvel of ascetic discipline. He was an equal member of
the sovereign nation, and at the same time had no life or interests outside
the collective tissue.

(5) QUESTIONS OF METHOD

Objections may be urged against the view that political Messianism as a
postulate preceded the compact set of social and economic ideas with which it
has come to be associated. It may be said that it is wrong to treat
Messianism as a substance that can be divorced from its attributes; to
consider it altogether apart from the events which produced it, the
instruments which have been used to promote it, and the concrete aims and
policies of the men who represented it at any given moment. Such a procedure,
it may be said, presupposes an almost mystical agency active in history. It
is important to answer this objection not less for its philosophical
significance than for the question of method it raises. What this study is
concerned with is a state of mind, a way of feeling, a disposition, a pattern
of mental, emotional and behaviouristic elements, best compared to the set of
attitudes engendered by a religion. Whatever may be said about the
significance of the economic or other factors in the shaping of beliefs, it
can hardly be denied that the all-embracing attitudes of this kind, once
crystallized, are the real substance of history, The concrete elements of
history, the acts of politicians, the aspirations of people, the ideas,
values, preferences and prejudices of an age, are the outward manifestations
of its religion in the widest sense.

The problem under discussion could not be dealt with on the plane of
systematic, discursive reasoning alone. For as in religion, although the
partial theological framework may be a marvel of logic, with syllogism
following syllogism, the first premises, the axioms or the postulates must
remain a matter of faith. They can be neither proved nor disproved. And it is
they that really matter. They determine the ideas and acts, and resolve
contradictions into some higher identity or harmony. The postulate of some ultimate,
logical, exclusively valid social I order is a matter of faith, and it is not
much use trying to defeat it by argument. But its significance to the
believer, and the power it has to move men and mountains, can hardly be
exaggerated. Now, in Europe and elsewhere, for the last century and a half,
there have always been men and movements animated by such a faith, preparing
for the Day, referring all their ideas and acts to some all embracing system,
sure of some pre-ordained and final denouement of the historic drama with all
its conflicts into an absolute harmony. Jacobins may have differed from the
Babouvists, the Blanquists from many of the secret societies in the first
half of the nineteenth century, the Communists from the Socialists, the
Anarchists from all others, yet they all belong to one religion. This
religion emerged in the second part of the eighteenth century and its rise |
will be traced in these pages. The most difficult problem of the secular
religion was to be the antinomy of freedom and the exclusive Messianic
pattern. Complex, intricate and at times magnificent as the theories evolved
by the various Messianic trends in the later days were, the original phase,
which is the subject of this study, reveals the first elements and threads in
a crude, naive and simple form. This fact should help towards understanding
the historic phenomenon as a whole. For some of the basic ideas of the late
and highly developed Messianic secular religion, especially, as it will be
shown, those relating to human nature, ethics and philosophical principles,
have remained the same as they were in the eighteenth century. It is in the
nature of doctrines postulating universal abstract patterns to be schematic
and grey. They lack the warmth, limpidity and richness which is to be found
in living human and national tissues. They do not convey the tensions which
arise between unique personalities, in conflict with each other and their
surroundings. They fail to offer the absorbing interest of the unpredictable
situation and the pragmatic approach to it. But all these, absent in the
doctrine, emerge in the vicissitudes of the doctrine as a sociological force.
This study is neither purely a treatise on political theory, nor a recital of
events. Justice would not be done to the subject by treating it in terms of
the individual psychology of a few leaders. Nor would the point be made clear
by an analysis in terms of mass psychology. Religion is created and lived by
men, yet it is a framework in which men live. The problem analyzed here is
only partly one of behavior. The modern secular religion must first be
treated as an objective reality. Only when this has been done will it be
possible to consider the intellectual and historical patterns created by the
interplay between the secular religion and particular men and situations.
This interplay becomes particularly interesting, when it results in
contradictions between, on the one side, the impersonal pattern and, on the
other, the demands of the particular situation and the uniqueness of
personality.

IN I755 Morelly in the Code de la Nature set out to " lift the veil
" so that all should be able to behold " with horror, the source
and origin of all evils and all crimes ", and learn " the simplest
and most beautiful lessons of nature perpetually contradicted by vulgar
morality and vulgar politics". He placed on the one side the science of
natural morality, which was meant to be the same for all nations, and was as
simple and as self-evident in its axioms and consequences " que les
mathematiques elles-memes "; and on the other side the chaos of errors,
absurdities, false starts and loose ends, presented by the whole of human
history. Morelly's aim was to find a situation where it would be "
almost impossible for 'I man to be depraved and vicious ", and in which
man would be as happy as possible. Chance, " cette pretendue fata]ite
", would be exorcised from the world. Morelly thought in terms of
deliberate planning, but at the same time claimed to be only discovering an
objective pattern of things. This pattern is conceived by him as a social
mechanism, a " marvelous automatic machine". It is described as
" tout intelligent qui starrangeat lui-meme par un micanisme aussi
simple que merveilleux; ses parties etaient preparees et pour ainsi dire
taillees pour former le plus bel assemblage ". Like any being in nature,
mankind has " un point f~xe d'integrite ", to which it is ascending
by degrees. The natural order is this ultimate fulfilment of mankind.
Morelly's Code de la Nature is the earliest in the series of writings with
which this study is concerned. It was the first book in modern times to put
fully-fledged communism on the agenda as a practical programme, and not
merely as a Utopia. It became Babenf's Bible, although he happened to
attribute the work to Diderot. A soulless, badly written book, very crude in
its premises and argument, not very influential in the pre-Thermidorian
period of the Revolution, it expresses nevertheless in an exaggerated form
the common tenets of eighteenth-century thought. All the eminent French
political writers of the second part of the century were engaged in a search
for a new unitary principle of social existence. Vague as to the concrete
nature of the principle, they all met on common ground as far as the
postulate of such a principle was concerned. The formulae differed only in
emphasis, and some of these differences deserve to be illustrated. Helvetius,
laying all the emphasis on utilitarianism, of which he was, in his De
l'Esprlt (I758), the first teacher, and Holbach, writing in the seventies,
and preaching materialist determinism, I both postulated a kind of cosmic
pragmatism, of which the social order was only a replica. The structure of
the world is such that | if society were properly balanced, all that is true
would also be socially useful, and all that is useful would also be virtuous.
None therefore would be vicious except fools, and none unhappy but the
ignorant and wicked, in other words, those who presume to kick against the
necessary, natural order of things. I Mably, who like Morelly was in the last
resort a Communist, and therefore had a fixed image of the desired natural
pattern, in; contrast to the vagueness of the utilitarian postulate, strove
for scientific certainty in social and human affairs. He believed that
politics could develop from the most conjectural into a most exact science,
once the recesses of the human heart and passions had been explored, and a
scientific system of ethics defined. I Condorcet, writing at the height of
the Revolution in 1793, when he was in hiding and about to die the victim of
the triumph of his ideas, summed up in a most moving manner the achievement
-of his age by claiming that it had come into the possession of a universal
instrument equally applicable to all fields of human endeavour. The same
instrument was capable of discovering those general principles which form the
necessary and immutable laws of justice, of probing men's motives, of
"ascertaining the truth of natural philosophy, of testing the effects of
history and of formulating laws for taste ". Once this instrument had
been applied to morals and politics, a degree of certainty was given to those
sciences little inferior to that which obtained in the natural sciences. This
latest effort, Condorcet claimed, had placed an everlasting barrier between
the human race and the " old mistakes of its infancy that win forever
preserve us from a relapse into former ignorance " The analogy with the
claims of dialectical materialism in the next century is evident. Placed in
this context Rousseau occupies a position all his own. He starts from the
same point as the others. He wants to investigate the nature of things,
right, reason and justice in themselves, and the principle of legitimacy.
Events and facts have no claim to be taken for granted, and to be considered
natural, if they do not conform to one universally valid pattern, no matter
whether such a pattern has ever existed. And yet, Rousseau makes no attempt
to link up his ideal social order with the universal system and its
as-embracing principle. A mighty fiat conjures up the social entity whatever
its name, the State, the social contract, the Sovereign or the general win.
The entity is autonomous, without as it were antecedents or an external point
of reference. It is self sufficient. It is the source and maker of Al moral
and social values, and yet it has an absolute significance and purpose. A
vital shift of emphasis from cognition to the categorical imperative takes
place. The sole, as explaining and as-determining principle of the
philosopher, from which all ideas may be deduced, is transformed into the
Sovereign, who cannot by definition err or hurt any of its citizens, Man has
no other standards than those laid down by the social contract. He receives
his personality and all his ideas from it. The State takes the place of the
absolute point of reference embodied in the universal principle. The
implications of this shift of emphasis will be examined later.
Eighteenth-century thought, which prepared the ground for the French
Revolution, should be considered on three different levels: first, criticism
of the ancient regime, its abuses and absurdities; second, the positive ideas
about a more rational and freer system of administration, such as, for
instance, ideas on the separation of powers, the place of the judiciary, and
a sound system of taxation; and lastly, the vague Messianic expectation
attached to the idea of the natural order. It is due to this last aspect that
social and political criticism in eighteenth-century writings always seems to
point to things far beyond the concrete and immediate grievances and demands.
So little is said directly about, for instance, feudal abuses or particular
wrongs, and so much, however vaguely, about eternal principles, the first
laws of society, and the cleavage of mankind into ruling and exploiting
classes, into haves and have-nots, that I has come into existence in
contradiction to the dictates of nature. An incalculable dynamism was
immanent in the idea of the natural | order. When the Revolution came to test
the eighteenth-century teachings, the sense of an imminent and total
renovation was almost universal. But while to most the idea of the natural
order preached by the philosopher appeared as a guiding idea and a point of
reference, only to be approximated and never really attained, to the more
ardent elements it became charged with a driving power that could I never be
halted tip it had run out its fun and inexorable course. I And that course
appeared to expand into boundlessness. It is easy to imagine the horror of
Robespierre's listeners at the Convention when, desperately anxious to know
where all the purges and all the terror were leading, after all possible
Republican and popular measures had already been taken, and the sternest
reprisals against counter-revolutionaries applied, they heard the
Incorruptible say that his aim was to establish at last the natural order and
to realize the promises of philosophy. There was something strikingly
reminiscent of the medieval evangelical revolutionaries quoting the Sermon on
the Mount to the dignitaries of the Church in Babenf's pleading before the
Court at Vendome. He read extract after extract from Rousseau, Mably, Morelly
and others, and asked his judges, haunted by the memory of Robespierre's
reign of virtue, why he should be tried for having taken the teachings of the
fathers of the Revolution seriously. Had they not taught that the natural
order would result in universal happiness ? And if the Revolution had failed
to realize this promise, could one claim that it had come to an end ? The
survivors of the Gironde restored to power after the downfall of Robespierre,
who in 1792 were still using the same vocabulary as Robespierre and keeping
up a constant appeal to nature and its laws, had learned their frightful
lesson in year II of the Republic. Writers like Benjamin Constant and Mme de
Stael were soon to develop their brand of liberal empiricism in answer to 1793.
It was out of that inner certainty of the existence of a natural and wholly
rational and just order that scientific socialism and the idea of an integral
Revolution grew. Already, however, by the end of 1792 a Girondist "
liberal " grew alarmed. Thus Salle wrote to Dubois-Crance: " The
principles, in their metaphysical abstractness and in the form in which they
are being constantly analyzed in this society-no government can be founded on
them; a principle cannot be rigorously applied to political association, for
the simple reason that a principle admits of no imperfection; and, whatever
you may do, men are imperfect. I say more: I make bold to say, and indeed, in
the spirit of Rousseau himself, that the social state is a continuous
violation of the will of the nation as conceived in its abstract
relationships. What may not be the results of these imprudent declamations
which take this will as a safe basis; which, under the pretext of full and
complete sovereignty of the people, will suffer no legal restriction; which
present man always in the image of an angel; which, desirous of discovering
what befits him, ignore what he really is; which, in an endeavour to persuade
the people that they are wise enough, give them dispensation from the effort
to be that ! . . . I would gladly, if you like, applaud the chimera of
perfection that they are after. But tell me, in divesting in this way man of
what is human in him, are they not most likely to turn him into a ferocious
beast ? "

Eighteenth-century philosopher were never in doubt that they were
preaching a new religion. They faced a mighty challenge. The Church claimed
to offer an absolute point of reference to man and society. It also claimed
to embody an ultimate and all embracing unity of human existence across the
various levels of human and social life. The Church accused secular
philosophy of destroying these two most essential conditions of private and
public -morality, and thereby undermining the very basis of ethics, and
indeed society itself. If there is no God, and no transcendental sanction,
why should men act virtuously? Eighteenth-century philosophy not only
accepted the challenge, but turned the accusation against the Church itself.
The philosopher felt the challenge so keenly that, as Diderot put it, they
regarded it their sacred duty to show not only that their morality was just
as good as religious ethics, but much better. Holbach was at pains to prove
that the materialistic principle was a much stronger basis for ethics than
the principle of the " spirituality of the soul " could ever claim
to be. A great deal of eighteenth-century thought would assume a different
complexion, if it was constantly remembered that though a philosophy of
protest, revolt and spontaneity, eighteenth-century philosophy, as already
hinted, was intensely aware of the challenge to redefine the guarantees of
social cohesion and morality. The philosopher were most anxious to show that
not they, but their opponents, were the anarchists from the point of view of
the natural order. The philosophical line of attack on the Church was that
apart from the historic untruth of the revealed religion, it also stood
condemned as a sociological force. It introduced " imaginary" and
heterogeneous criteria into the life of man and society. The commandments of
the Church were incompatible with the requirements of society. The
contradiction was harmful to both, and altogether demoralizing. One preached
ascetic unworldliness, the other looked for social virtues and vigor. Man was
being taught to work for the salvation of his soul, but his nature kept him
earthbound. Religion taught him one thing, science another. Religious ethics
were quite ineffective, where they were not a source of evil. The promise of
eternal reward and the threat of everlasting punishment were too remote to
have any real influence on actual human conduct. This sanction at best
engendered hypocrisy. Where the teachings of religion were successful, they
resulted in human waste, like monasticism and asceticism, or in cruel intolerance
and wars of religion. Moreover, the " imaginary " teachings and
standards of the Church offered support and justification to tyrannical
vested interests harmful to society as a whole. Rousseau, Morelly, Helvetius,
Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet, not to mention of course Voltaire, were
unanimous in their insistence on the homogeneous nature of morality. Some,
the Voltairians and atheists, speak in terms of a deliberate plot against
society, when attacking the claims of religious ethics. Others, like Rousseau,
lay all the emphasis on matters of principle, above all the principle of
social unique: you' cannot be a citizen and Christian at the same time, for
the loyalties clash. " It is from the legislative body only," wrote
Helvetius, " that we cm expect a berveftcent religion . . . let
sagacious ministers be clothed with temporal and spiritual powers, and all
contradiction! between religious and patriotic precepts will disappear . . .
the religious system shall coincide with the national prosperity . . religions,
the habitual instruments of sacerdotal ambition, shall become the felicity of
the public."

Philosophy of protest, revolt and spontaneity, eighteenth-century
philosophy, as already hinted, was intensely aware of the challenge to
redefine the guarantees of social cohesion and morality. The philosopher were
most anxious to show that not they, but their opponents, were the anarchists
from the point of view of the natural order. The philosophical line of attack
on the Church was that apart from the historic untruth of the revealed
religion, it also stood condemned as a sociological force. It introduced
" imaginary" and heterogeneous criteria into the life of man and
society. The commandments of the Church were incompatible with the
requirements of society. The contradiction was harmful to both, and
altogether demoralizing. One preached ascetic unworldliness, the other looked
for social virtues and vigor. Man was being taught to work for the salvation
of his soul, but his nature kept him earthbound. Religion taught him one
thing, science another. Religious ethics were quite ineffective, where they
were not a source of evil. The promise of eternal reward and the threat of
everlasting punishment were too remote to have any real influence on actual
human conduct. This sanction at best engendered hypocrisy. Where the
teachings of religion were successful, they resulted in human waste, like
monasticism and asceticism, or in cruel intolerance and wars of religion.
Moreover, the " imaginary " teachings and standards of the Church
offered support and justification to tyrannical vested interests harmful to
society as a whole. Rousseau, Morelly, Helvetius, Holbach, Diderot,
Condorcet, not to mention of course Voltaire, were unanimous in their
insistence on the homogeneous nature of morality. Some, the Voltairians and
atheists, speak in terms of a deliberate plot against society, when attacking
the claims of religious ethics. Others, like Rousseau, lay all the emphasis
on matters of principle, above all the principle of social unity: you cannot
be a citizen and Christian at the same time, for the loyalties clash. "
It is from the legislative body only," wrote Helvetius, " that we
can expect a beneficent religion . . . let sagacious ministers be clothed
with temporal and spiritual powers, and all contradiction between religious
and patriotic precepts will disappear . . . the religious system shall
coincide with the national prosperity . . . religions, the habitual
instruments of sacerdotal ambition, shall become the felicity of the
public."

NATURAL ORDER: To POSTULATE 23

Holbach taught the same, and although Rousseau and Mably quarreled
bitterly with the two atheistic materialists, there was hardly a fundamental
disagreement between them. For even to them the vital consideration was not
really the existence of a Divine Being, but guarantees for social ethics.
Rousseau, the master of Robespierre, and Mably, whose religious ideas made
such a deep impression upon Saint-Just, were nearer Hebrew Biblical and
classical pagan conceptions than Christian ideas. Robespierre's Jewish idea
of Providence hovering over the Revolution was a conclusion from the
eighteenth-century view that the moral drama is played out under the judgment
of Nature exclusively within the framework of social relations. No
eighteenth-century thinker recognized any distinction between membership of a
kingdom of God and citizenship of an earthly state, in the Christian sense.
Whether, as the eighteenth century as a whole, in the spirit of the Old
Testament, believed, that reward and punishment for the deeds of one
generation are distributed to posterity, or whether, as Rousseau and Mably
thought, it was the individual who comes to judgment to be rewarded or
punished as an individual soul, the only virtues or sins recognized were
those of social significance. The only difference between Helvetius and
Holbach, on the one hand, and Rousseau and Mably, on the other, was that
according to the materialists social legislation and arrangements alone were
sufficient to ensure moral conduct, while Rousseau and Mably feared that man
may elude the law. It was vital that man should always remember that even if
he eludes the magistrate, the account would still have to be settled
elsewhere and before a higher tribunal. It was not less important that the
unhappy and the injured should not despair of justice in society, even if it
fails to come to their succor on earth. Rousseau, transcending the limits of
mechanical materialist rationalism, harked back to antiquity. He felt
compelled by the ancient sense of awe at the idea of a Divinity hovering over
the city-state, and imbuing every act of its life with a solemn significance.
He was fascinated by the pomp and thrill of collective patriotic worship in
the national religious fetes, games and public displays, while Mably was
convinced that no religion was possible without external forms, institutions
and fixed rites. The articles of Rousseau's civil religion, other than those
concerning the existence of Divinity and the immortality of the soul, do not
materially differ from " the principles that are eternal and invariable,
that are drawn from the nature of men and things, and like the propositions
of geometry are capable of the most rigorous demonstration ", upon which
Helvetius believed a universal religion should be founded. They refer to the
laws of the State and articles of the Social Contract. It was not only theism
that caused Rousseau to make the belief in Divinity a social necessity. It
was also the fact that his and Mably's approach differed from that of the
rationalists on the fundamental point, already made. The social harmonious
pattern of Helvetius, Morelly and Holbach was a matter of cognition. It was
there to be discerned and applied. In the case of Rousseau and Mably it was a
categorical imperative, a matter of will. The materialist determinists felt
confident that knowledge would be translated into action. Not so Rousseau and
Mably, with their different attitude to human nature, and their deep sense of
sin. Hence Rousseau felt driven to demand the death penalty for one who
disbelieved in the civil religion, while Mably wished to ban all atheists and
even deists, who claim that a religion of the heart was all that was wanted.
Man had to be made to fear God, and made to experience the sense of fear
constantly and vividly. Too much has been made of the contradiction between
the chapter on the Civil Religion in the Social Contract and the Pro Cession
de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard. The latter may well have been a shock to the
materialists in so far as the purely philosophical problem of the existence
of a personal deity was concerned. The direct and intensive relationship
between man and God of the Vicar of Savoy need not, however, necessarily be
taken as a refutation oft the self sufficiency of the religion of society. It
would be so if the State or society were to be considered as purely human
contrivances) If the State or Society are, as in the case of Robespierre,
regarded as existing under the personal Providence of God, like the pre exilic
Hebrew society, and if the relationship between God and man, unlike that
presented by the Old Testament, does not entail a hierarchical organization
and a system of laws and duties outside the framework of social institutions
and laws, then the purely religious sense of awe and patriotic piety not only
need not clash' but are likely to become fused into the Robespierre type of
mysticism. There are no other priests than the magistrates, religious and
patriotic ceremonial are the same, and to serve you country is to serve God.

The faith in a natural order and the immutable, universal principles
deduced from it was the cause of the almost universal opposition in the
second part of the eighteenth century to Montesquieu's central idea, in spite
of the high esteem in which the father of the idea of republican virtue was
held. The lack of understanding for the pragmatic evolution of social forms
was so great that Morelly took the Esprit des Lois to be a didactic tract
designed to show the vagaries and follies of mankind, once they had deviated
from and abandoned the state of nature. Politics, according to Sicyes, was an
art, and not a descriptive science like physics. Its object was to plan, to
create reality and to do so in obedience to a permanent pattern. It was,
Sieyes maintained, natural law that was old, and the errors of existing
societies were new. Diderot did not think that a knowledge of history must
precede that of morality. It seemed to him more useful and expedient to gain
an idea of the just and unjust I' before possessing a knowledge of the
actions and the men to whom one ought to apply it ". The emphasis upon
" ought " instead of " why " was Rousseau's answer to
Montesquieu. In the much quoted passage in Emile Rousseau says that
Montesquieu was the only man capable of . creating the " great and
useless " science of politics, or rather political right, but
unfortunately contented himself with dealing with the positive laws of the
established governments, " et rien au monde n'est plus different que ces
deux etudes ". Rousseau's own references to relativism conditioned by
different geographical circumstances do not affect his general approach. They
appear to tee the necessary tributehe feels obliged to pay to political
geography, and they usually occur when the subject is economics. Condorcet,
like Rousseau, thought that Montesquieu would have done better had he been
less occupied with finding " the reasons for that which is there than
with seeking that which ought to be". More interesting and less noticed
was eighteenth-century criticism of Montesquieu which implied that his
relativism was due to his having given preference to geographical and other
factors over the human factor. The underlying assumption of this criticism-a
point to be developed later-was the idea that while objective conditions make
for variety, it was human nature that called for uniformity. Even Montesquieu
himself, never quite a " Montesquieu'ist "-as Marx not a
Marxist-believed in natural laws derived from man's inner being as a constant
and immutable quality. Helvetius and Mably maintained that Montesquieu's
thesis was vitiated by his failure to recognize that human psychology was the
only vital factor in shaping political systems. To Helvetius it was the
desire for power and the ways of obtaining it. Mably recognized human
passions, and not climatic differences or the particular configuration of a
territory, as the decisive factor in politics. He believed that human
psychology was the same in every climate. Hence, knowledge of psychology was
the safest way to scientific politics. Condorcet and others put the main
emphasis on the rights of man as the condition of an exclusive social system.
His criticism should be read together with his comparison between the French
Revolution and the political systems of antiquity and the United States of
America. The case between rationalist politics and political empiricism has
nowhere been made clearer on the side of eighteenth century French
philosophy. Condorcet objects to the empiricism of the ancient Greek
political philosophy. It was a science of facts, but not a true theory
founded upon general, universal principles, nature and reason. The Greek
thinkers aimed less at extirpating the causes of evil than at destroying
their effects by opposing their causes one to another. In brief, instead of
applying a systematic and radical cure, they tried to play up to prejudices
and vices, and play them off against each other so as to cancel their
effects. No effort to disperse and suppress them was made. The result was,
that these policies deformed, misled, brutalized and inflamed men, instead of
refining and purifying them. Condorcet seems at one time to come very near
Morelly's condemnation of what to-day would be called reformism: the
perennial effort, in the words of the Code de la Nature, to perfect the
imperfect. This procedure -claimed Morelly-only complicates the chain of
evils, misleads the people and kills the energy for a radical reform. Like
all his eighteenth-century predecessors, Condorcet based his idea of a
radical reform on the immutable necessities of human nature, or rather the
rights of man derived from them. He thought that the Greeks had a
consciousness of rights, but failed to comprise trend their coherent
structure, their depth, extent and real nature.

They saw in them, as it were, a heritage, a set of inherited rights, and
not a coherent, objective framework. Even the American Revolution had not yet
achieved the full consciousness of these principles. The Americans had not
yet acquired principles sufficiently invariable not to fear that legislators
might introduce into the political institutions their particular prejudices
and passions. Their object could not as yet therefore be to build on the
firm, permanent basis of nature and universal maxims a society of men equal
and free; they had to be content with establishing " laws to hereditary
members ", that is to say, within the context of the given realities and
expediency. The American system therefore offered an example of a search for
a mean between the oligarchy of the rich and the fickleness of the poor,
inviting tyranny. The French Revolution marked the absolute turning point.
" We arrived at the period when philosophy . . . obtained an influence
on the thinking class of men, and these on the people and their governments
that ceasing any longer to be gradual produced a revolution in the entire
mass of certain nations, and gave thereby a secure pledge of the general
revolution one day to follow that shall embrace the whole human species . . .
after ages of error, after wandering in all the mazes of vague and defective
theories, writers . . . at length arrived at the knowledge of the true rights
of man . . . deducted from the same principle . . . a being endowed with
sensation, capable of reasoning . . . laws deduced from the nature of our own
feeling . . . our moral constitution." The French Revolution compared
with the American Revolution had been an event on quite a different plane. It
had been a total revolution in the sense that it had left no sphere and
retrospect of human existence untouched, whereas the American Revolution had
been a purely political change-over. Furthermore, while the French Revolution
had enthroned equality and effected a political transformation based upon the
identity of the natural rights of man, the American Revolution had been
content to achieve a balance of social powers based on inequality and
compromise. It was this human hubris and impious presumption that frail man
is capable of producing a scheme of things of absolute and final significance
that, on the one hand, provoked some of Burke's most eloquent passages and,
on the other, led Joseph de Maistre, Bonald and their school to proclaim the
idea of theocratic absolutism.

Chapter Two THE SOCIAL PATTERN AND FREEDOM : :. (HELVETIUS AND HOLBACH)

(a)IDENTITY OF REASON WE now reach the core of our problem, the paradox of
freedom. The fighting argument of the teachers of the natural system was that
the powers that be and their theoretical defenders deliberately or ignorantly
took no heed of human nature. All the evils, vices and miseries were due to
the fact that man had not consulted his true nature, or had been prevented
from doing so by ignorance, which was spread and maintained by vested
interests. Had man probed his true nature, he would have discovered a replica
of the universal order. By obeying the postulates of his own nature he would
have acted in accordance with the laws of Nature as a whole, and thus avoided
all the entanglements and contradictions in which history has involved him.
Now the paradox is that human nature, instead of being regarded as that
stubborn, unmanageable and unpredictable Adam, is presented here as a vehicle
of uniformity, and as its guarantee. The paradox is based upon vital
philosophical premises. There is a good deal of confusion as to the
philosophical kinship of the eighteenth-century philosophers. It is made
worse by the fact that the philosopher were not philosophers in the strict
sense of the word. They were eclectics. They were as much the heirs of Plato
and Descartes as puff Locke and Hume, of philosophical rationalism and
empirical skepticism, of Leibnitz and' Condillac's associationist theory. Not
even a founder of utilitarianism like Helvetius, or one of the most important
teachers of materialist determinism like Holbach, ever made their position
unequivocally clear. But it is necessary to sum up what all the
eighteenth-century thinkers had in common in their underlying premises as far
as it affects the subject of this investigation. Following the footsteps of
Descartes, the philosopher believed in truth that is objective and stands on
its own, and which can and would be recognized by man. To Holbach truth was
the conformity of our ideas with the nature of things. Helvetius believed
that all the most complicated metaphysical propositions could be reduced to
questions of fact that white is white and black is black. Nature has so
arranged that there should be a direct and unerring correlation between
objects and our powers of cognition. Helvetius, Holbach and Morelly
repeatedly say that error is an accident only. We all would see and judge
rightly if it were not for the ignorance or the particular passions and
interests that blind our judgment, these being the result of bad education or
the influence of vested interests alien to man. Everyone is capable of
discovering the truth, if it is presented to him in the right light. Every
member of Rousseau's sovereign is bound to will the general will. For the
general will is in the last resort a Cartesian truth. Helvetius goes so far
as to deny any inherent differences of ability and talent. These are nothing
but the product of conditions and chance. Uniform education, the placing of
all children in as similar conditions as possible, their subjection to
exactly the same impressions and associations, would reduce the differences
of talent and ability to a minimum. With what eagerness this theory was
seized upon by the revolutionary egalitarians, especially Buonarroti Genius
can be reared, and you can multiply men of genius according to plan, taught
Helvetius. Rationalists and empiricists at the same time, eighteenth-century
thinkers felt no incongruity when boasting that in contrast to their
opponents they based their theories on experience alone. They never tired of
urging people to observe and study man in order to learn how he behaves and
what are his real needs. But this emphasis on empiricism was directed not
against philosophical rationalism, but only against the authoritarian,
revealed religion and the teachings of tradition. Their empiricism was
vitiated by the rationalist premise of Man per se, human nature as such
ultimately endowed with only one unifying attribute, reason, or at most two,
reason and self-love. If there is such a being as Man in himself, and if we
all, when we throw off our accidental characteristics, partake of the same
substance, then a universal system of morality, based on the fewest and
simplest principles, becomes not only a distinct possibility, but a certainty.
Such a system would be comparable in its precision to geometry, and the most
cherished dream of philosophers since Locke would come true. Since this
universal system of ethics is a matter of intellectual cognition, and since
it is quite sure that Nature intended the moral order to be purposeful and
conducive to happiness, it becomes quite clear that all the evils that exist,
all chaos and misery, are due simply to error or ignorance. Man, however, is
a creature not only of reason but of individual and unpredictable passion.
" Will the simplicity and uniformity of these principles agree with the
different passions of men ? " Helvetius' answer to his own question is
that however different the desires of men may be, their manner of regarding
objects is essentially the same. There is no need to accept the individual's
actual refusal to submit his passionate nature to reason as a fact that must
be taken for granted and will always be with us. And here eighteenth-century
philosophy was immensely helped by the associationist psychology of
Condillac, with its roots in Locke. The mind is at birth a tal~ula rosa, with
no innate ideas, characteristics or vices. All are formed by education,
environment and associations of ideas and impressions. Man is a malleable
creature. He is by nature neither good nor bad, rather good in so far as he
is accommodating to what Nature intended him to be. All his actual badness
and viciousness . is a result of evil institutions, and may be traced still
further to the " first little chain " of evils, the original fatal
error as Morelly and Holbach called it, the idea that man is bad. The
institutions and t laws erected on this premise were calculated to thwart man
and his legitimate aspirations. They acted as an irritant and made man evil,
which the powers that be took for a further justification of their oppressive
methods. Man is a product of education. Education in the widest sense of the
word, including of course the laws, is capable of reconciling man with the
universal moral order and objective truth. It can teach him to throw off the
passions and urges which act against the harmonious pattern, and develop in
him the passions useful to society. In a society from which the Church had
been excluded and which treated social utility as the sole criterion of
judgment, education like everything else was bound to be focused in the
governmental system. It was a matter for the Government. Helvetius, Holbach,
Mably, the Physiocrats and others, in the same way as Rousseau himself, believed
that ultimately man was nothing I but the product of the laws of the State,
and that there was nothing that a government was incapable of doing in the
art of forming man. How fascinated Helvetius was by the power and greatness
of the founder of a monastic order, able as he was to deal with man in the
raw, outside the maze of tradition and accumulated circumstances, and to lay
down rules to shape man like clay. Rousseau's adored Legislator is nothing
but the great Educator.

(b) Self Interest The problem of man's self-interest is the central point
of the eighteenth-century theory. Prima facie, man's self-love is calculated
to be the rock upon which any harmonious social pattern might founder.
Eighteenth-century thinkers declared it however to be the most important
asset for social co-operation. They hailed it as the most precious gift of
Nature. Without the desire for happiness and pleasure, man would sink into
sloth and indifference and, as Helvetius, Rousseau, Morelly, Mably, Holbach
and others all agreed, would have never attained his real self ¿fulfillment,
which can be achieved only in organized society and in the relationships
maintained by it. Self-love is the only basis of morality, for it is the most
real and most vital element in man and human relations. It therefore offers a
simple and safe standard to judge how people would act and what could satisfy
them. But the main value of the principle is in the fact that man's
self-interest in the natural state, far from setting him | irretrievably at
variance with his fellow men and society, draws I them together as nothing
else, no transcendental commandments, could. Self-love, as Morelly defined
it, is by nature indissolubly bound up with the instinct of benevolence, and
thus plays in the sphere of social relations the same part as Newton's law of
gravitation in the physical world. According to Helvetius and Holbach, nature
has so arranged that man cannot be happy without the happiness of others, and
without making others happy. Not only because he needs the sight of happiness
in others to feel happy himself, but also because, owing to cosmic
pragmatism, our courses and interests are so linked up in a higher unity that
man working for his own welfare inevitably helps others and society. Holbach
called the vicious man a bad calculator. Virtue is nothing but the wise
choice of what is truly useful to himself and at the same time to others.
Reason is the intellectual capacity for making the right choice, while
liberty is the practical knowledge of what is conducive to happiness, and the
ability to act on it. No sacrifice of self-interest is required. On the
contrary, a legislator demanding it would, in the words of Mably, be insane.
What the individual may be asked is to forgo immediate advantages for more
solid and permanent gains in the future. He may properly be invited to lose
his soul to win it back, to surrender some selfish interests to society so as
to be able to increase the solid totality of good, embodied in the social
good, from which his own particular interest inevitably flows. For
ultimately, if group interests within society are eliminated, and replaced!
by a general interest, deduced from human nature, common to an equal degree
to everyone, the general interest is nothing but one's individual interest
writ large. Man's real interest is immanent in the general social good.
Selfishness and vice do not pay. In words reminiscent of Plato, Holbach
speaks of a harmony of the soul that constitutes happiness, and comes into
existence when man is at peace with himself and his environment. The man torn
by passions, tormented by cupidity, worn out by frustration, tossed about by
heterogeneous urges, has his harmony disturbed and becomes miserable. In
brief, even from the strictly utilitarian point of view, virtue is its own
reward. The virtuous man, as our writers never tire of repeating, cannot fail
to be happy. The happiest is the man who realizes that I his happiness lies
in self-adjustment to the necessary order of things, ! that is to say, in the
pursuit of happiness in harmony with others. All misery is the outcome of a
vain attempt to kick against the natural order from which man can never
depart without peril to I himself All misery and all vices come, as Rousseau
put it, from the preference man gives to his amour-propre over his amour de
sol, legitimate and natural self-love. What is useful is virtuous and true.
Not just in the sense of limited pragmatism that that is true which in a
limited sphere produces results. It is so owing to what has been called here
cosmic pragmatism. Things were meant to fit, and their appropriateness is
demonstrated by results. Their appropriateness is also their truth, for the
universe is simultaneously a system of truths and a I wonderful machine
designed to produce results. The pattern of social harmony cannot be left to
work itself out by itself The designs of nature to be realized require
deliberate arrangements. The natural identity of interests must be reproduced
by the artificial identification of interests. It is the task of the
Legislator to bring-about social harmony, that is to say, reconcile the
personal good with the general good. It is for the Legislator, as Helvetius
put it, to discover means of placing men under the necessity of being
virtuous. This can be achieved with the help of institutions, laws, education
and a proper system of rewards and punishments. The Legislator, acting on man箂
instinct of self-love, is capable of forcing him to be just to others. He can
direct man's passions in such a way that instead of being destructive they
would come to bear good fruit. The object of the laws is to teach man his
true interest, which is after all another name for virtue. This can be done
if there is a clear and effective distribution of rewards and punishments. A
proper system of education in the widest sense would fix firmly in the minds
of men the association of virtue with reward, and of vice with punishment,
these embracing of course also public approval and disapproval. " The
whole art of this sublime architecture consists in making laws which are wise
and learned enough to direct my self-love in such a way that I neglect, so to
speak, my particular advantage, and to reward me liberally for the
sacrifice,'' wrote Mably. It is a question of external arrangements and of
education at the same time. The personal good may be made with the help of
appropriate institutions and arrangements to flow back from the general good
so that the citizen, having his legitimate needs satisfied, would have no
incentive to be anti-social, He can be made fully conscious of this and made
to behave accordingly. Helvetius and Holbach taught that the temporal interest
alone if handled cleverly was sufficient to form virtuous men. Good laws
alone make virtuous men. This being so, vice in society is not the outcome of
the corruption of human nature, but the fault of the Legislator. This
statement is not invalidated even if it is admitted that man as he is would
naturally always prefer his personal to the general good. For man is only a
raw element in regard to the edifice of social harmony. A legislation is
possible under which none would be unhappy but fools and people maimed by
nature, and none vicious but the ignorant and stupid. That such a society has
not yet come into existence is due not to man, but to the failure of
governments to form man with the help of education and proper laws. For the
restoration of the natural order would be effected only as a result of a
total change in man's actual nature. And so the natural identity of interests
is completely over-shadowed I by the postulate of their artificial
identification. Until now education had been left to chance and made the prey
of false maxims. It was now time to remember that all felicity was the
outcome of education. " Men have in their own hands the instrument of
their greatness and their felicity, and . . . to be happy and powerful
nothing more is requisite than to perfect the science of education."
Legislators, moralists and natural scientists should combine to form man on
the basis of their teachings, the conclusions of which converge upon the same
point. Governments have it in their power to rear genius, to raise or lower
the standard of ability in a nation. This, as Helvetius and Holbach insist,
has nothing to do with climate or geography. Since human thought is so
important for man's disposition towards the general good and towards his
fellow citizens, and the harmonious pattern in general, it is only natural
and necessary that a government should take a deep interest in shaping the
ideas of men and exercise a censorship of ideas.

(C) THE NATURAL ORDER, THE LEGISLATOR, AND t: THE INDIVIDUAL These ideas on
self-interest and the power of education have strong political and social
implications. As justice only has meaning in reference to social utility, it
is clear that a just action is one that is useful to the greater number. It
could thus be said that morality consists in the interest of the greater
number. The greater number embodies justice. " It is evident," says
Helvetius, " that justice is in its own nature always armed with a power
sufficient to suppress vice, and place men under necessity of being virtuous."
j Why have the few, representing a minority and therefore an I immoral
interest, for so long dominated the greater number? Because of ignorance and
misleading influences. The existing powers are interested in maintaining
ignorance and in preventing the growth of genius and virtue. It is therefore
clear that a reform of education could not take place without a change of
political constitution.

The art of forming man, in other words education, depends ultimately on
the form of government. Self ¿Love as applied to the political sphere means
the love of power. Political wisdom consists not in thwarting this natural
instinct, but in giving it an outlet. The satisfaction of this urge like the
satisfaction of man's legitimate self-interest is conducive to virtue. From
this point of view democracy appears as the best system, as it satisfies the
love of power of all or of most. The totalitarian potentialities of this
philosophy are not quite obvious at first sight. But they are nevertheless
grave. The very idea of a self-contained system from which all evil and
unhappiness have been exorcised is totalitarian. The assumption that such a
scheme of things is feasible and indeed inevitable is an invitation to a
regime to proclaim that it embodies this perfection, to exact from its
citizens recognition and submission and to brand opposition as vice or
perversion. The greatest danger is in the fact that far from denying freedom
and rights to man, far from demanding sacrifice and surrender, this system
solemnly re-affirms liberty, man's self-interest and rights. It claims to
have no other aims than their realization. Such a system is likely to become
the more totalitarian, precisely because it grants everything in advance,
because it accepts all liberal premises a priori. For it claims to be able by
definition to satisfy them by a positive enactment as it were, not by leaving
them alone and watching over them from the distance. When a regime is by
definition regarded as realizing rights and freedoms, the citizen becomes
deprived of any right to complain that he is being deprived of his rights and
liberties. The earliest practical demonstration of this was given by
Jacobinism. Thus in the case of Rousseau his sovereign can demand from the
citizen the total alienation of all his rights, goods, powers, person and
life, and yet claim that there is no real surrender. In the very idea of
retaining certain rights and staking out a claim against the sovereign there
is, according to Rousseau, an implication of being at variance with the
general will. The proviso that the general will could not require or exact a
greater surrender than is inherent in the relationship between it and the
subject does not alter the case, since it is left to the sovereign to decide
what must be surrendered and what must not. Rousseau's sovereign, like the
natural order, can by definition do nothing except secure man's freedom. It
can have no reason or cause to hurt the citizen. For it to do so would be as
impossible as it would be for something in the world of things to happen
without a cause. There is no need to insist that neither Helvetius, Holbach
nor any one of their school envisaged brute force and undisguised coercion as
instruments for the realization of the natural system. Nothing could have been
further from their minds. Locke's three liberties figure prominently in all
their social catechisms. They could not conceive any clash between the
natural social pattern and the liberties, the real liberties, of man. The
greater the freedom, the nearer, they believed, was the realization of the
natural order. In the natural system there would simply be no need to
restrict free expression. Opposition to the natural order would be
unthinkable, except from fools or perverted individuals. The Physiocrats, for
instance, were second to none in their insistence on a natural order of
society " simple, constant, invariable and susceptible of being
demonstrated by evidence". Mercier de la Riviere preached "
despotism of evidence " in human affairs. The absolute monarch was the
embodiment of the " force naturelle et irresistible de ['evidence
", which rules out any arbitrary action on the part of the
administration. The Physiocrats insisted at the same time on the freedom of
the press and the " full enjoyment" of natural rights by the
individual. A government conducted on the basis of scientific evidence could
only encourage a free press and individual freedom ! Eighteenth-century
believers in a natural system failed to perceive that once a positive pattern
is laid down, the liberties which are supposed to be attached to this pattern
become restricted within its framework, and lose their validity and meaning
outside it. The area outside the framework becomes mere chaos, to which the
idea of liberty simply does not apply, and so it is possible to go on
reaffirming liberty while denying it. Robespierre was only the first of the
European revolutionaries who, having been an extreme defender of the freedom
of the press under the old dispensation, turned into the bitterest persecutor
of the opposition press once he came into power. For, to quote the famous
sophism launched during the later period of the Revolution against the
freedom of the press, the very demand for a free press when the Revolution is
triumphant is counter-revolutionary. It implies freedom to fight the
Revolution, for in order to support the Revolution there is no need for
special permission. And there can be no freedom to fight the Revolution. On
closer examination the idea of the natural order reaches the antithesis of
its original individualism. Although prima facie the individual is the
beginning and the end of everything, in fact the Legislator is decisive. He
is called upon to shape man in accordance to a definite image. The aim is not
to enable men as they are to express themselves as freely and as fully as
possible, to assert their uniqueness. It is to create the right objective
conditions and to educate men so that they would fit into the pattern of the
virtuous society.

Chapter Three TOTALITARIAN DEMOCRACY (ROUSSEAU)

(a) THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND ROUSSEAU often uses the words nature and
the natural order in the same sense as his contemporaries to indicate the
logical structure of the universe. He also uses nature, however, to describe
the elemental as opposed to the effort and achievement of the spirit in
overcoming and subduing the elemental. The historical state of nature before
organized society was the reign of the elemental. The inauguration of the
social state marked the triumph of the spirit. It must be repeated that to
the materialists the natural order is, so to speak, a ready-made machine to
be discovered and set to work. To Rousseau, on the other hand, it is the
State, when it has fulfilled its purpose. It is a categorical imperative. The
materialists reached the problem of the individual versus the social order
only late in their argument. Even then, supremely confident of the
possibility of mutual adjustment, they failed to recognize the existence of
the problem of coercion. To Rousseau the problem exists from the beginning.
It is indeed the fundamental problem to him. A motherless vagabond starved of
warmth and affection, having his dream of intimacy constantly frustrated by
human callousness, real or imaginary, Rousseau could never decide what he
wanted, to release human nature or to moralize it by breaking it; to be alone
or a part of human company. He could never make up his mind whether man was
made better or worse, happier or more miserable, I by people. Rousseau was
one of the most ill-adjusted and egocentric natures who have left a record of
their predicament. He was a bundle of contradictions, a recluse and
anarchist, yearning to return to nature, given to reverie, in revolt against
all social conventions, sentimental and lacrimose, abjectly self-conscious
and at odds with his environment, on the one hand; and the admirer of Sparta
and Rome, the preacher of discipline and the submergence of the individual in
the collective entity, on the other. The secret of this dual personality was
that the disciplinarian was the envious dream of the tormented paranoiac. The
Social Contract was the sublimation of the Discourse on the Origins of
Inequality. Rouseseau speaks of his own predicament, when describing in
}smile and elsewhere the unhappiness of man, who, after he left the state of
nature, fell prey to the conflict between impulse and the duties of civilized
society; always " wavering between his inclinations and his duties
", neither quite man nor quite citizen, " no good to himself, nor
to others ", because never in accord with himself The only salvation
from this agony, if a return to the untroubled state of nature was
impossible, was either a complete self ¿abandonment to the elemental impulses
or to " denature (de'naturer) man" altogether. It was in the latter
case necessary to substitute a relative for an absolute existence, social
consciousness for self-consciousness. Man must be made to regard himself not
as a " unite numerique, l'entier absolu, qui n'a de rapport qu'a
lui-meme ", but as a " unite fonctionnaire qui tient au
denominateur et dont la valeur est dans son rapport aver l'entier, qui est le
'corps social ". A fixed rigid and universal pattern of feeling and
behavior was to be imposed In order to create man of one piece, without
contradictions, without centrifugal and anti-social urges. The task was to
create citizens who would will only what the general will does, and thus be
free, instead of every man being an entity in himself, torn by egotistic
tensions and thus enslaved. Rousseau, the teacher of romantic spontaneity of
feeling, was obsessed with the idea of man's cupidity as the root cause of
moral degeneration and social evil. Hence his apotheosis of Spartan ascetic
virtue and his condemnation of civilization in so far as civilization is the
expression of the urge to conquer, the desire to shine and the release of
human vitality, without reference to morality. He had that intense awareness
of the reality of human rivalry peculiar to people who have experienced it in
their souls. Either out of a sense of guilt or out of weariness, they long to
be delivered from the need for external recognition and the challenge of
rivalry. Three other representatives of the totalitarian Messianic
temperament to be analyzed in these pages show a similar paranoiac streak.
They are Robespierre, Saintlust and Babeu¿C ¿ In recent times we have had
examples of the strange combination of psychological ill-adjustment and
totalitarian ideology. In some cases, salvation from the impossibility of
finding a balanced relationship with fellow-men is sought in the lonely
superiority of dictatorial leadership. The leader identifies himself with the
absolute doctrine and the refusal of others to submit comes to be regarded
not as a normal difference of opinion, but as a crime. It is characteristic
of the paranoiac leader that when thwarted he is quickly thrown off his
precarious balance and falls victim to an orgy of self-pity, persecution
mania and the suicidal urge. Leadership is the salvation of the few, but to
many even mere membership of a totalitarian movement and submission to the
exclusive doctrine may offer a release from ill-adjusted egotism. Periods of
great stress, of mass psychosis, and intense struggle call forth marginal
qualities which otherwise may have remained dormant, and bring to the top men
of a peculiar neurotic mentality.

(b) THE GENERAL VILE AND THE INDIVIDUAL It was of vital importance to
Rousseau to save the ideal of liberty, while insisting on discipline. He was
very proud and had a keen sense of the heroic. Rousseau's thinking is thus
dominated by a highly fruitful but dangerous ambiguity. On tile one hand, the
individual is said to obey nothing but his own will; on the other, he is
urged to conform to some objective criterion. The contradiction is resolved
by the claim that this external criterion is his better, higher, or real
self: man's inner voice, as Rousseau calls it. Hence, even if constrained to
obey the external standard, man cannot complain of being coerced, for in fact
he is merely being made to obey his own true self He is thus still free;
indeed- freer than before. For freedom is the triumph of the spirit over
natural, elemental instinct. It is the acceptance of moral obligation and the
disciplining of irrational and selfish urges by reason and duty. The
acceptance of the obligations laid down in the Social Contract marks the
birth of man's personality and his initiation into freedom. Every exercise of
the general will constitutes a reaffirmation of man's freedom. The problem of
the general will may be considered from two points of view, that of
individual ethics and that of political legitimacy. Diderot in his articles
in the Encyclopedia on the Legislateur and Droit naturel was a forerunner of
Rousseau in so far as personal ethics are concerned. He conceived the problem
in the same way it: as Rousseau: as the dilemma of reconciling freedom with
an external absolute standard. It seemed to Diderot inadmissible that the
individual as he is should be the final judge of what is just and unjust,
right and wrong. The particular will of the individual is always suspect. The
general will is the sole judge. One must always address oneself for judgment
to the general good and the general will. One who disagrees with the general
will renounces his humanity and classifies himself as " denature".
The general will is to enlighten man " to what extent he should be man,
citizen, subject, father or child ", " et Wand it lui convient de
vivre on de mourir". The general will shall fix the nature and limits of
all our duties. Like Rousseau, Diderot is anxious to make the reservation in
regard to man's natural and most sacred right to all that is 1 not contested
by the " species as a whole". He nevertheless hastens, again like
Rousseau, to add that the general will shall guide us on the nature of our
ideas and desires. Whatever we think and desire will be good, great and
sublime, if it is in lteepirlg with the general interest. Conformity to it
alone qualifies us for membership of our species: " ne la perdez done
jamais de vue, sans quoi vous verrez les notions de la bonte, de la justice,
de lthumanite, de la vertu, chanceler dans votre entendement". Diderot
gives two definitions of the general will. He declares it first to be
contained in the principles of the written law of all civilized nations, in
the social actions of the savage peoples, in the conventions of the enemies
of mankind among themselves and even in the instinctive indignation of
injured animals. He then calls the general will " dans chaque individu
un acte pur de l'entendement qui raisonne darts le silence des passions sur
ce que l'homme pent exiger de son semblable et sur ce que son semblable est
en droll d'exiger de lui ". This is also Rousseau's definition of the
general will in the first version of the Social Contract. Ultimately the
general will is to Rousseau something like a mathematical truth or a Platonic
idea. It has an objective existence of its own, whether perceived or not. It
has nevertheless to be discovered by the human mind. But having discovered
it' the human mind simply cannot honestly refuse to accept it. In this way
the general will is at the same time outside us and within us. plan is not
invited to express his personal preferences. He is not asked for his approval.
He is asked whether the given proposal is or is not in conformity with the
general will. " If my particular opinion had carried the day, I should
have achieved the opposite of what was my will; and it is in that case that I
should not have been free." For freedom is the capacity of ridding
oneself of considerations, interests, preferences and prejudices, whether
personal or collective, which obscure the objectively true and good, which,
if I am true to my true nature, I am bound to will. What applies to the
individual applies equally to the people. Man and people have to be brought
to choose freedom, and if necessary to be forced to be free. The: general ~11
becomes ultimately a question of enlightenment and morality. Although it
should be the achievement of the general will to create harmony and
unanimity, the whole aim of political life is really to educate and prepare
men to will the general will without any sense of constraint. Human egotism
must be rooted out, and human nature changed. " Each individual, who is
by himself a complete and solitary whole, would have to be transformed into
part of a greater whole from which he receives his life and being."
Individualism will have to give place to collectivism, egoism to virtue,
which is the conformity of the personal, to the general will. The Legislator
" must, in a word, take away from man his resources and give him instead
new ones alien to him, and incapable of being made use of without the help of
other men. The more completely these natural resources are annihilated, the
greater and the more lasting are those which he acquires, and the more stable
and perfect the new institutions, so that if each citizen is nothing and can
do nothing without the rest; and the resources acquired by the whole are
equal or superior to the aggregate of the resources of all Individuals, it
may be said that legislation is at the highest possible point of
perfection." As in the case of the materialists, it is not the
self-expression of the individual, the deployment of his particular faculties
and the realization of his own and unique mode of existence, that is the
final aim, but the loss of the individual in the collective entity by taking
on its color and principle of existence. The aim is to train men to "
bear with docility the yoke of public happiness ", in fact to create a
new type of man, a purely political creature, without any particular private
or social loyalties, any partial interests, as Rousseau would call them.

(c) THE GENERAL WILL, POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY, AND DICTATORSHIP Rousseau's
sovereign is the externalized general will, and, as has been said before,
stands for essentially the same as the natural harmonious order. In marrying
this concept with the principle of popular sovereignty, and popular
self-expression, Rousseau gave rise to totalitarian democracy. The mere
introduction of this latter element, coupled with the fire of Rousseau's
style, lifted the eighteenth-century postulate from the plane of intellectual
speculation into that of a great collective experience. It marked the birth
of the modern secular religion, not merely as a system of ideas, but as a
passionate faith. Rousseau's synthesis is in itself the formulation of the
paradox of freedom in totalitarian democracy in terms which reveal the
dilemma in the most striking form, namely, in those of will. There is such a
thing as an objective general will, whether willed or not willed by anybody.
To become a reality it must be willed by the people. If the people does not
will it, it must be made to will it, for the general will is latent in the
people s will. Democratic ideas and rationalist premises are Rousseau's means
of resolving the dilemma. According to him the general will would be
discerned only if the whole people, and not a part of it or a representative
body, was to make the effort.. The second condition is that individual men as
purely political atoms, and not groups, parties or interests, should be
called upon to will. Both conditions are based upon the premise that there is
such a thing as a common substance of citizenship, of which all partake, once
everyone is able to divest himself of his partial interests and group
loyalties. In the same way men as rational beings may arrive at the same
conclusions, once they rid themselves of their particular passions and
interests and cease to depend on " imaginary " standards which
obscure their judgment. Only when all are acting together as an assembled
people, does man's nature as citizen come into active existence. It would
not, if only a part of the nation were assembled to will the general will.
They would express a partial will. Moreover, even the fact that all have
willed something does not yet make it the expression of the general will, if
the right disposition on the part of those who will it was not there. A will
does not become general because it is willed by all, only when I it is willed
in conformity to the objective will. Exercise of sovereignty is not conceived
here as the interplay of interests, the balancing of views, all equally
deserving a hearing, the weighing of various interests. It connotes the
endorsement of a truth, self-identification on the part of those who exercise
sovereignty with some general interest which is presumed to be the fountain
of all identical individual interests. Political parties are not considered
as vehicles of the various currents of opinion, but representatives of
partial interests, at variance with the general interest, which is regarded
as almost tangible. it is of great importance to realize that what is to-day
considered as an essential concomitant of democracy, namely, diversity of
views and interests, was far from being regarded as essential by the
eighteenth-century fathers of democracy. Their original postulates were unity
and unanimity. The affirmation of the principle of diversity came later, when
the totalitarian implications of the principle of homogeneity had been
demonstrated in Jacobin dictatorship. This expectation of unanimity was only
natural in an age which, starting with the idea of the natural order,
declared war on S11 privileges and inequalities. The very eighteenth-century
concept of the nation as opposed to estates implied a homogeneous entity.
Naive and inexperienced in the working of democracy, the theorists on the eve
of the Revolution were unable to regard the strains and stresses, the
conflicts and struggles of a parliamentary democratic regime as ordinary
things, which need not frighten anybody with the spectre of immediate ruin
and confusion. Even so moderate and level-headed a thinker as Holbach was
appalled by the " terrible" cleavages in English society. He
considered England the most miserable country of all, ostensibly free, but in
fact more unhappy than any of the Oriental despot-ridden kingdoms. Had not
England been brought to the verge of ruin by the struggle of factions and
contradictory interests ? Was not her system a hotchpotch of irrational
habits, obsolete customs, incongruous laws, with no system, and no guiding
principle ? The physiocrat Letronne declared that " the situation of
France is infinitely better than that of England; for here reforms, changing
the whole state of the country, can be accomplished in a moment, whereas in
England such reforms can always be blocked by the party system", It is
worth while devoting a few words to the Physiocrats at this juncture, for
their thinking reveals a striking similarity to totalitarian democratic
categories, in spite of the differences of outlook. The Physiocrats offer an
astonishing synthesis of economic liberalism and political absolutism, both
equally based upon the most emphatic postulate of natural harmony. Although
they preached that in the economic sphere the free play of individual
economic interests and pursuits would inevitably result in harmony, they were
intensely aware of opposing, conflicting and unequal interests, where
politics were concerned. In their view these tensions were the greatest
obstacle to social harmony. Parliamentary institutions, the separation and
balance of powers, were thus impossible as roads to social harmony. The
various interests would be judges in their own cause. The clashes among them
would paralyze the State. The Physiocrats thus rejected the balance of
powers, claiming that if one of the powers is stronger, then there is no real
balance. If they were of exactly the same strength, but pulled in different
directions, the result would be total inaction. The object of legislation is
not to achieve a balance and a compromise, but to act on strict evidence,
which according to the Physiocrats was a real thing, having as it were
nothing to do with, and lifted above, all partial interests. The authority
acting on this evidence must accordingly be " autorite souveraine,
unique, superieure a tons individus . . . interets particuliers":
"le chef unique", " qui soit le centre commun darts lequel
tous les interets des differents ordres de citoyens viennent se reunir sans
se confondre ". The Physiocrats had so great a faith in the power of
evidence to effect rational conduct that they refused to consider the possibility
that the absolute monarch might abuse his authority. They believed in the
absolute monarch acting on strict evidence, and in the isolated individual.
These two factors represented the general interest, while the intermediate
partial interests falsified the evidence ", and led man astray on to
selfish paths. " There will be no more estates (orders) armed with
privileges in a nation, only individuals fully enjoying their natural
rights." Rousseau puts the people in place of the (hysiocratic enlightened
despot. He too considers partial interests the greatest enemy of social
harmony. Just as in the case of the rationalist utilitarian the individual
becomes here the vehicle of uniformity. It could be said without any
exaggeration that this attitude points towards the idea of a classless
society. It is conditioned by a vague expectation that somewhere at the end
of the road and after an ever more intensive elimination of differences and
inequalities there will be unanimity. Not that this unanimity need be enforced
of itself. The more extreme the forms of popular sovereignty, the
moredemocratic the procedure, the surer one may be of unanimity. Thus Morelly
thought that real democracy was a regime where the citizens would unanimously
vote to obey nothing but nature. The leader of the British Jacobins, Horne
Tooke, standing trial in 1794, defined his aim as a regime with annual
parliaments, based on universal suffrage, with the exclusion of parties, and
voting unanimously. Like the Physiocrats Rousseau rejects any attempt to
divide sovereignty. He brands it as the trick of a juggler playing with the
severed limbs of an organism. For if there is only one will, sovereignty
cannot be divided. Only that in place of the Physiocratic absolute monarch
Rousseau puts the people. It is the people as a whole that should exercise
the sovereign power, and not a representative body. An elected assembly is
calculated to develop a vested interest like any other corporation. A people
buys itself a master once it hands over sovereignty to a parliamentary I
representative body. I Now at the very foundation of the principle of direct
and indivisible democracy, and the expectation of unanimity, there is the
implication of dictatorship, as the history of many a referendum has shown. If
a constant appeal to the people as a whole, not just to a small
representative body, is kept up, and at the same time unanimity is
postulated, there is no escape from dictatorship. This I was implied in
Rousseau's emphasis on the all-important point that the leaders must put only
questions of a general nature to the people, and, moreover, must know how to
put the right question. The question must have so obvious an answer that a
different sort of answer would appear plain treason or perversion. If unanimity
is what is desired, it must be engineered through intimidation, election
tricks, or the organization of the spontaneous popular expression through the
activists busying themselves with petitions, public demonstrations, and a
violent campaign of denunciation. This was what the Jacobins and the
organizers of people's petitions, revolutionary journe'es, and other forms of
direct expression of the people's will read into Rousseau. Rousseau
demonstrates clearly the close relation between popular sovereignty taken to
the extreme, and totalitarianism. The paradox calls for analysis. It is
commonly held that dictatorship comes into existence and is maintained by the
indifference of the people and the lack of democratic vigilance. There is
nothing that Rousseau on more than the active and ceaseless participation of
the people and of every citizen in the affairs of the State. The State is
near ruin, says Rousseau, when the citizen is too indifferent to attend a
public meeting. Saturated with antiquity, Rousseau intuitively experiences
the thrill of the people assembled to legislate and shape the common weal.
The Republic is in a continuous state of being born. In the pre-democratic
age Rousseau could not realize that the originally deliberate creation of men
could become transformed into a Leviathan, which might crush its own makers.
He was unaware that total and highly emotional absorption in the collective
political endeavour is calculated to kill all privacy, that the excitement of
the assembled crowd may exercise a most tyrannical pressure, and that the
extension of the scope of politics to all spheres of human interest and
endeavour, without leaving any room for the process of casual and empirical
activity, was the shortest way to totalitarianism. Liberty is safer in
countries where politics are not considered all-important and where there are
numerous levels of non-political private and collective activity, although
not so much direct popular democracy, than in countries where politics take
everything in their stride, and the people sit in permanent assembly. In the
latter the truth really is that, although all seem to be engaged in shaping
the national will, and are doing it with a sense of elation and fulfillment,
they are in fact accepting and endorsing something which is presented to them
as a sole truth, while believing that it is their free choice. This is
actually implied in Rousseau's image of the people willing the general will.
The collective sense of elation is subject to emotional weariness. It soon
gives way to apathetic and mechanical behavior. Rousseau is most reluctant to
recognize the will of the majority, or even the will of all, as the general
will. Neither does he give any indication by what signs the general will
could be recognized. Its being willed by the people does not make the thing
willed the expression of the general will. The blind multitude does not know
what it wants, and what is its real interest. " Left to themselves, the
People always desire the good, but, left to themselves, they will always know
where that good lies. The general will is always right, but the judgment
guiding it is not always well informed. It must be made to see things as they
are, sometimes as they ought to appear to them."

(d) THE GENERAL WILL AS PURPOSE The general will assumes thus the
character of a purpose and as such lends itself to definition in terms of
social-political ideology' a pre-ordained goal, towards which we are
irresistibly driven; a solely true aim, which we will, or are bound to will,
although we may not will it yet, because of our backwardness, prejudices,
selfishness or ignorance. In this case the idea of a people becomes naturally
restricted to those who identify themselves with the general will and the
general interest. Those outside are not really of the nation. They are
aliens. This conception of the nation (or people) was soon to become a
powerful political argument. Thus Sieyes claimed that the third estate alone
constituted the nation. The Jacobins restricted the term still further, to the
sans-culottes. To Babeuf the proletariat alone was the nation, and to
Buonarroti only those who had been formally admitted to the National
Community. The very idea of an assumed preordained will, which has not yet
become the actual will of the nation; the view that the nation is still
therefore in its infancy, a " young nation ", in the nomenclature
of the Social Contract, gives those who claim to know and to represent the
real and ultimate will of the nation-the party of the vanguard-a blank cheque
to act on behalf of the people, without reference to the people's actual
will. And this, as we hopes later on to show it has, may express itself in
two forms or rather two stages: one-the act of revolution; and the other-the
effort at enthroning the general will. Those who feel themselves to be the
real people rise against the system and the men in power, who are not of the
people. Moreover, the very act of their insurrection, I e.g. the
establishment of a Revolutionary (or Insurrectionary) Committee, abolishes ipso
facto not only the parliamentary representative body, which is in any case,
according to Rousseau, a standing attempt on the sovereignty of the people,
but indeed all existing laws and institutions. For " the moment the
people is legitimately assembled as a sovereign body, the jurisdiction of the
government wholly lapses, the executive power is suspended, and the person of
the meanest citizen is as sacred and inviolable as that of the first
magistrate; for in the presence of the person represented, representatives no
longer exist ". The real people, or rather their leadership, once
triumphant in their insurrection, become Rousseau's Legislator, who surveys
clearly the whole panorama, without being swayed by partial interests and
passions, and shapes the " young nation " with the help of laws
derived from his superior wisdom. He prepares it to will the general will.
First comes the elimination of men and influences not of the people and not
identified with the general will embodied in the newly established Social
Contract of the Revolution; then the re-education of the young nation to will
the general will. The task of the Legislator is to create a new type of man,
with a new mentality, new values, a new type of sensitiveness, free from old
instincts, prejudices and bad habits. It is not enough to change the
machinery of government, or even reshuffle the classes. You have to change
human nature, or, in the terminology of the eighteenth century, to make man
virtuous. Rousseau represents the most articulate form of the esprit
re'volutionnaire in each of its facets. In the Discourse on Inequality he
expresses the burning sense of a society that has gone astray. In the Social
Contract he postulates an exclusively legitimate social system as a challenge
to human greatness.

Chapter Four PROPERTY (MORELLY AND MABLY)

(a) PREMISES AND CONCLUSIONS-THE DISCREPANCY THE idea of the natural
social pattern as analyzed in the foregoing pages must appear unsatisfactory.
It is an abstract- postulate, a shell without contents; nothing but a form.
The social and economic concreteness, which alone could give it a substance,
has been missing from the analysis. There has been much controversy on the
amount of socialism in eighteenth-century thought. Some have found fully
fledged socialism in it, others not a great deal of socialism, or no hint of
socialism at all. The truly remarkable feature of eighteenth-century thinking
is not the presence or absence of socialism, but the discrepancy between the
boldness of the premises and the timidity of the practical conclusions, where
the problem of property was concerned. The Marxist historian may well feel
justified in pointing out that this discrepancy was due to the bourgeois
background of the writers. They appealed to a sole principle of social
existence, and to the equality inherent in natural rights, against the
privileges of the feudal classes. They beat a retreat, when this political
and philosophical postulate proved to carry with it a threat to property.
When speaking of Man, it did not occur to some of our thinkers that the
" canaille " was included in the term. Some even emphatically
rejected the idea. Only the bourgeois was Man. Those beneath him were too
ignorant, too brutalized, had too little share in maintaining society, to be
counted at all. And yet, the socialist dynamism in the idea of the natural]
system can hardly be denied. The very idea of a natural, rational order
carried with it the implication of an orderly social pattern, unless it be
held, as the Physiocrats did hold, that free economics are the very essence
of the natural order, since they are bound in the end to result in perfect
harmony. In the idea of the rights of Man, in the conception of the
individual Man as the first and last so element of the social edifice, there
was inherent the implication that all existing forms and interests may and
should be upset and entirely reshaped, so as to give Man his due. On these
principles property could not be regarded as a sacred natural right to be
taken for granted. Everything could be remodeled at any time. The _gument was
not, as it used to be, that the poor and unfortunate Citizen has a right to
expect succor from the paternal royal Government, and in order to bring it
the Government may override any interests. Man in the natural order does not
ask for charity, he is the focus of the whole social and economic system. The
egalitarian idea condemned unequal classes and privileges as an evil that
came into existence in contradiction to the teachings of Nature and the needs
of Man. Some writers went so far as to brand the existing State and all its
legislation as a weapon of exploitation and a ruse of the haves to hold down
the have-nots. Furthermore, if virtue was conformity to the natural pattern,
its greatest enemy was clearly the spirit of selfish avarice engendered by
private property. Not only avowed Communists like Morelly and Mably, but also
Rousseau, Diderot and Helvetius were agreed that " all these evils are
the first effect of property and of the array of evils inseparable from the
inequality to which it gave birth". Diderot contrasted the " esprit
de propriete " with the " esprit de communaute ". He
admonished the Legislator to combat the former and to foster the latter, if
his aim were to make man's personal will identical with the general will.
Rousseau's eloquent passage on the first man who enclosed a plot of land with
a fence, deceived his neighbors into the belief in the legality of his act,
and thus became the author of all the wars, rivalries, social evils and
demoralization in the world, is not more radical than Morelly's and Mably's
obsessive insistence that property is the root cause of all that has gone
wrong in lustory. Rousseau's condemnation of the laws as an instrument of the
rich to make the poor accept exploitation and misery is a counterpart of
Helvetius's statement that " the excessive luxury, which almost
everywhere accompanies despotism, presupposes a nation already divided into
oppressors and oppressed, into thieves and those robbed. But if the thieves
form only a very small number, achy do not they succumb"-Helvetius
asks-" to the efforts of the greatest number ? To what do they owe their
success ? To the impossibility to make common causes (' se donner le mot ')
in which the robbed ones find themselves." Helvetius was on common
ground with most of his contemporaries, when he claimed that only a regime of
State ownership, with money banished, offered a possibility of a legislation,
stable and unalterable, calculated to preserve general happiness. He added
his own utilitarian gloss. If it be true that man is motivated by self
interest alone, he will in a country of powerful private interests be
naturally attracted to serve those interests, instead of the national
interests. Where the nation is the sole distributor of rewards, a person
would have no need to serve any other interest than the national. In
Rousseauist theory " the State by the reason of the Social Contract is
the master of all its members' goods", since every citizen on entering
the Social Contract has surrendered all his property to the State. He
received it back to hold it as trustee of the Commonwealth, but his rights
and powers are always subordinated to the overriding claim of the community.
Rousseau would actually have wished to see all property concentrated in the
hands of the State, and no individual admitted to any share of the common
stock " save in proportion to his services ". Rousseau would have
arranged that with the demise of the owner all his property should escheat to
the State. He proposes in the Projet de Constitution pour le Corse the
establishment of a large public domain. The State would alienate holdings to
private citizens for a number of years on a trust. Government land would be i
cultivated by a system of corve'es. All these ideas, however, were
contradicted by the very writers who put them forward. Rousseau, Helvetius
and Mably concurred that private property had become the cement of the social
order, and the foundation stone of the Social Contract. Helvetius called
private property " le droll le plus sacre ....dieu moral des
empires". The inconsistency is the most flagrant in the case of Mably,
whose manner of wrestling with it is, in spite of his extremism, i
representative of the school as a whole.

(b) MORBLLY, THE COMMUNIST , The only consistent Communist among the
eighteenth-century thinkers was Morelly. According to him, avarice, "
cette pests universelle . . . cettefievre lente ", would never have come
into being, if there had been no private property. All trouble in the world
is born either of cupidity or of insecurity. If all goods were in common, and
nobody had anything in particular, there would be no irritant for cupidity,
and no fear of insecurity. All would naturally have worked for the common
good, obeying their natural l desire for personal happiness, and inevitably
contributing to the happiness of others. " Otez la propriete aveugle et
l'impitoyable interet qui l'accompagne . . . plus de passions furieuses, plus
d'actions feroces, plus de notions, plus d'idees de mal moral." Every
moral, social and political evil is due to property, and no remedy short of
the abolition of private property was possible. It is no use blaming accident
or fate for the troubled conditions of states and empires. In the state of
nature, where there is no private property, everything works with the
regularity and precision of a clock. Morelly regards Communism as a practical
proposition. This gives a peculiar complexion to his approach to the question
of compulsion to induce man to conform to the general good. He recognizes
that a transitional regime of " some severity " may be necessary to
restore the natural Communist order. There is, however, no violence involved,
he claims, in an attempt to bring man back to nature, which means to his true
nature. The argument that human nature, as it has come to be under the
influence of civilization and evil circumstances, cannot be changed, is
false. This deformed, distorted nature of man is not his real nature. Nature,
like truth, is constant and invariable. It does not alter because man has
turned his back on it. The truth is that Morelly confuses liberty with
security. Liberty, furthermore, is achieved according to him not in privacy
or nonconformity, but in co-operation and in fitting into the collective
whole so that the machine as a whole functions smoothly. The author of Code
de la Nature firmly upholds the creed of Theodicy. Providence could not have
delivered humanity to eternal chaos and hazard. There must be a conclusion
after a long period of trial and error. This Messianic conclusion I will be
the Communist state of nature. Morelly is one of the very few Utopian
Communists who were not ascetics. In a striking passage he rebuffed Rousseau,
without mentioning him by name, for his condemnation of the arts and
civilization as producing immorality. He called Rousseau a cynical sophist.
The arts have ennobled our existence. If they had also contributed to our
deterioration, this was due solely to their association with the " principle
venimeux de toute corruption morale, qui infecte tout ce qu'il touche".
Morelly's Communist vision of the perfect society presupposes spiritual
totalitarianism, in addition to perfect planning. The system of production
and consumption would be based on public stores to which all produce would be
brought, and from which it would be distributed according to needs. There
would be an overall plan. Every city would fix the number of those who should
take up a particular branch of science or art. No other moral philosophy
would be taught than that which forms the basis of the laws. This social
philosophy will have as its foundations the I utility and wisdom of the laws,
the " sweetness of the bonds of I blood and friendship", the
services and the mutual obligations) which the citizens owe to each other,
the love and usefulness of labor, and the rules of good order and concord.
" Toute metaphysique se reduira a ce qui a ete precedamment dit de la
Divinite.'' Speculative and experimental sciences would be free, but moral
philosophy " retranche ". " There will be one kind of public
code of all sciences, to which nothing will ever be added in what concerns!
metaphysics and ethics beyond the limits prescribed by the laws, added will
be only physical, mathematical and mechanical dis coveries confirmed by
experience and reason." Laws would be engraved on obelisks, pyramids and
public squares. They would be followed literally, without the slightest
alteration being permitted I Mably worked on the same premises and arrived at
the same Communist conclusions as Morelly. But only in theory. While Morelly
was a convinced optimist, Mably was a man of a morose pessimistic nature. His
thinking was hampered and his position made most difficult by the hard core
of his Catholicism. The juxtaposition of Catholicism and eighteenth-century
categories of thought make Mably a singularly interesting case. His whole
attitude was determined by a secularized idea of the fall of man and original
sin. Hence his fundamental distinction between the ideally and solely true
and just, and the half-truths, the semi justice and the palliatives of the
world in which, for our sins, we are destined to live. Like a medieval
moralist he wrote: " si notre avarice, notre vanite et notre ambition
vent des obstacles insurmontables a un Lien parfait, subissons sans murmurer
la peine que nous Britons." Mably was a Messianic type gone sour. If the
element of original sin is left out, Mably easily qualifies as a prophet of
Communist Messianism, and in fact he became the prophet of Babouvism. For
Mably there is always in the background the vision of an ideal social harmony
of egalitarian Communism projected into the golden age of a remote past or
into the realm of a natural and a solely valid scheme of things. It is never quite
clear whether the sinful disposition of man destroyed the original harmony,
or whether the destruction of this harmony by private property and inequality
has ruined man's innocence. Mably not only does not consider the original
natural community of goods a chimera, but claims never to have ceased to be
surprised that men abandoned that state at all. He can see nothing in
mankind's history since then but one everlasting Walpurgis of the passions,
of greed and avarice above all. This is a constant theme in his writings and
is elaborated ad nauseam on every occasion. Although admitting that without
the driving power of passion, nothing positive would ever have been achieved,
Mably only reluctantly considers the passions as releasing creative forces,
and seldom acknowledges the mystery, or what Hegel was to call " die
List der VernunEt ", that evil ingredients are inseparable from the
process of achieving good things. As if foreshadowing psychoanalysis, and
following Hume, Mably seeks all motives of human action in dark urges,
aggressive impulses, irrational aversions and inhibitions. Reason is always
the handmaid of the passions. Conscious ideas and alleged evidence are at
bottom rationalizations of our irrational urges,` " The passions are so
eloquent, so lively and so active that they need no evidence to convince our
reason, or to force reason to become their accomplice." " Wiles
bravent meme ['evidence." The most imperious, indeed the common
denominator, of all passions is self-love. A benevolent instinct in the state
of nature, since the establishment of inequality and private property,
self-love has erected a barrier between man and man, and when it seems to
bring us together, it is only in order to arm one against the other. This
state of things would continue until a " community of goods and equality
of conditions has imposed a silence upon them ". This is the only
arrangement that can destroy those particular interests which will always
triumph over the general interest. Equality alone, without a community of
goods, would be ephemeral, giving place within two or three generations to
the same glaring inequalities, misery on the one hand, and luxury and
exploitation on the other. But as this " plus haut degre de perfection
" can hardly be expected, there is need to fix a regime for mankind in
the state of sin. The first condition of some order in this sinful state is
respect for property. Mably emphatically disclaims any intention of raising a
" sacrilegious hand " against private property, under the pretext
of producing the " great good ". In the early days all that tended
to loosen the natural community of goods, and directly or indirectly to
introduce private property, was an unmitigated crime. Once private property
had been established, however, any law is wise which deprives the passions of
every means or pretext of hurting or endangering the rights of property in
the slightest degree. In the state of sin attacks on property are no less an
expression of cupidity than the love of property. Mably thus becomes
entangled in the gravest incongruities and contradictions. Property is the
source of all evil, and yet he would protect it. In common with all
eighteenth-century thinkers he takes human self-love for granted and man's
desire for happiness as the basis for all social arrangements. He is at the
same time deeply suspicious and contemptuous of human nature. Like his
contemporaries he is a determinist, but at the same time overwhelmed by the
anarchy and unpredictability of human passions. The outcome of these
contradictions is the egalitarian Jacobin idea of ascetic virtue equated with
happiness, and a thoroughly restrictive conception of economics. Man should
be made happy. But happiness is not to Mably a release of vitality, but-a
phrase destined to become a favourite with Robespierre, Saint-Just and
Babeuf-" bonheur I de mediocrite "; " Nature has but one
happiness in spite of the vagaries of societies ", and this it offers
equally to all men. Resorting to psychological determinism, Mably declares
that the fixing of an equal quantity of happiness is made possible by the
essential likeness of human passions and similarity of their inevitable
effects. He believes in " an art of government fixed, determinate and
unchangeable, since the nature of man, whose happiness is the scope of
policy, is connected with and depends on a fixed, determinate and
unchangeable principle ". The safest road to happiness is the sentiment
of equality, just as the sole criterion by which the laws should be judged is
their contribution to the establishment of equality. Men and nations are
under the same law: every type of hubris, be it exaggerated ambition or an
over-great success, must end in ruin. And so the greatest happiness is to
Mably the tranquillity of the soul, with passions at rest; the wisest
policy-moderation and frugality; and the greatest strength-mediocrity that
goes without ambition and scheming. In order to make man happy, the State
must imbue him with the sentiment of virtuous equality. It must "
regulate the movements of your heart ", to make you " contract
honest habits, and defend your reason against the blows of your passions
". Legislation must keep our passions " under strict subjection,
and by thus strengthening the sovereignty of reason, give a superior activity
to the virtues". All legislation must start with a reform of morals. The
supreme task of government is to employ the sacred violence which tears us
away from under the sway of the passions. Mably's moral asceticism leads him
to a denial of the value of culture. " A community which maintains moral
purity will never allow the invention of new arts." To Mably the
progress of the arts is tantamount to the progress of vice, and the work of
artists is pandering to the caprices and vices of the rich and ostentatious.
In all artistic endeavour Mably can see nothing else than a colossal waste of
skill, effort and genius-and all to arouse a dangerous admiration. Hardly
another thinker in modern times preached the doctrine of the incompatibility
of the good and the beautiful with the same vehemence as this morose Abbe.
" When I think ", he writes, " how disastrous all the
agreeable accomplishments had been to the Athenians, how much injustice,
violence and tyranny were inflicted upon the Romans by the pictures, statues
and vases of Greece, I ask myself what use we have for an Academy of Fine
Arts. Let the Italians believe that their ' babioles ' are an honor to a
nation. Let people come to seek models of laws, manners and happiness among
us, and not of painting. Rousseau and Mably agreed that there was nothing
more dangerous than vice when brilliant. As could be expected, Mably's ideas
on education are Spartan. The Republic should take away children from under
the exclusive tutelage of their parents. Otherwise there is bound to arise a
diversity of manners which would r,lilitate against equality. Mably thinks
that as most people are " condemned to the permanent infancy of their
reason ", being moved by " an instinct a little less coarse than
that of the animals ", it would be dangerous to allow a free press or
full religious toleration, until men were mature enough for it. It is true
that freedom of thought could not flourish under censorship. But it would
only be safe to grant freedom of discussion to the learned, for their errors
would be no danger to society, and would only stimulate discussion. It was an
error on the part of the newly-established United States of America to grant
freedom of political expression to its people, still so much imbued with the
bad ideas and habits of the Old World. And yet Mably would not agree that he
was advocating a system of oppression. He wrote in the best
eighteenth-century fashion that the aim of society was nothing else than to
preserve for all men the rights which they hold from " the generous
hands of nature ". The Legislator had no other commission than to impose
duties which it was essential for everyone to carry out. " You will
easily perceive how important it is to study the natural law . . . the law of
equality among men. Without such study, morality, without certain principles,
would run the risk of erring at every step." Mably claimed to be a
staunch upholder of the dignity of man, which should be " inviolably
respected " in every human being. Similarly Rousseau, having laid down a
blueprint of a totalitarian regime for Corsica, triumphantly concludes that
the measures prescribed by him will secure to the Corsicans all possible
freedom, since nothing would be demanded of them which is not postulated by
nature. As applied to economics this philosophy of virtuous happiness means
ascetic restrictionism. Here Mably found himself on common ground with other
contemporaries. If you cannot abolish property, you must watch over it.
" La propriete . . . ouvre la porte a cent vices et a cent abus,"
wrote Mably, " il est done prudent que des lois rigides veillent a cette
forte." Rousseau claimed for the State the right and power " to
give it (property) a standard, a rule, a curb to restrain it, direct it,
subdue it and keep it j always subordinate to the public good ". He
wished the individual ~ to be as independent as possible of his neighbour,
and as dependent as possible on the State. Precisely because the individual
has the supreme right to a secure existence, the State must have both the means
of securing it, and the power of putting a check on those who claim or
attempt to have more than their due by robbing others. Rousseau supplied
Babeuf with his main catchword, when he commanded the State to see to it that
all have enough and nobody more than enough. Hardly any of the thinkers with
whom we are concerned thought of economics in terms of expansion and increase
of wealth and comfort. Their primary consideration was egalitarian social
harmony, and the defense of the poor. Derived from this was something like
the medieval monk's fear of the appetites divitiarum I inf Colitis, the
anti-social passion, which kills the virtuous love of the general good. This
expressed itselfin two ways, in the demand for restricting the size of
property by legislation, and in the outspoken condemnation of the rising
industrial and commercial civilization. Mably wanted large fortunes to be
continually broken up by legislation. He wished to fix a maximum of property
to be allowed to a citizen, and also preached the idea of an agrarian law:
the redistribution of the land on an egalitarian basis. Rousseau taught that
no citizen should be so rich as to be able to buy up another, and none so
poor as to have to sell himself He advocated a progressive income tax to check
the growth of fortunes and, like Mably, was in favor of taxing luxury as
heavily as possible. There is no n1ore baffling feature in French
eighteenth-century social philosophy than the almost total lack of
presentiment or understanding of the new forces about to be released by the
Industrial Revolution. Few saw in the expansion of trade and industry a
promise of increased national prosperity. Most treated it as the excrescence
of the acquisitive spirit on the part of a small, selfish and unscrupulous
class; not a possibility of improvement for the workers, but a new I way of
degrading and enslaving them. All were agreed in considering the people on
the land as the backbone of the nation, indeed the nation itself. Rousseau
thought that an agricultural society was the natural home of liberty, and
Holbach believed that only those who owned land could be considered citizens.
Rousseau wanted I the " colon " to lay down the law for the
industrial worker. In his I famous speech on England Robespierre took it for
granted that I the English nation of merchants must be morally inferior to
the . agricultural French people.

All feared and despised commerce, big capital cities and urban
civilization in general. Rousseau called industry " cette partie trop
favorisee ". Holbach saw in commerce a social enemy. All the recent
wars, he claimed, had been caused by the greed of commercial interests and
had as their aim markets and the advantage of a small part of the nation.
" The capitalists and big merchants have no fatherland !" was the
universal cry. They pay no heed to the national interest, their sole
consideration is private, antisocial profit. " Negociants avides et qui
n'ont d'autre patrie que leurs coffees."" " La tranquility, l'
aisance, l es interets les plus chers d' un etat vent imprudemment sacrifices
a la passion d'enrichir un petit nombre d'individus." All this happens
because the money that commerce brings in is regarded as an instrument of
power and happiness. All forget the inflation caused by the surplus of money,
and the people's hardships that ensue from it. National credit is one of the
most pernicious inventions. " Rien n'est plus destructeur pour les
maeurs d'un people que ['esprit de finance." The memory of the Law
disaster and other financial and commercial scandals was still fresh. Far
from desiring to extend man's personality by inspiring him with new
aspirations and needs, far from seeing the value of civilization in diversity
and variety, most eighteenth-century political writers -moralists in the first
place-condemned industry and commerce for precisely provoking new and "
imaginary needs ", and stirring up man's caprices: " desire
extravagants . . . fantaisies bizarres d'un tas de desccuvres." Mably
coupled in this condemnation also the arts and crafts. He saw " millions
of artisans occupied with stirring up our passions ", and providing us
with things which we would be only too happy not to have heard of And here
Mably, the fanatical egalitarian, and preacher of the sacred dignity of man,
makes the astonishing suggestion that the whole class of artisans Al workers
should be excluded from the right to exercise national sovereignty, "
especes d'esclaves du public . . . qui vent sans fortune, et qui, ne
subsistent que par leur industrie, n'appartiennent en quelque sorte a aucune
socic'te ". These classes are condemned to cater for the vices and
caprices of the rich, they depend on the favors of their employers, and thus
are too debased and too ignorant to partake in the formation of the national
will. They lack the dignity, independence and freedom necessary for a
Legislator, and have no interest in the maintenance of the social framework
Holbach wrote in almost precisely the same terms. Mably urged the Legislator
to deal with the " slaving " classes kindly, for otherwise they may
easily become the enemies of society. Mirabeau complained that all attention
was being paid to the large factories called " manufactures
reunies", where hundreds of workers would work under a single director,
and hardly any thought to the so very numerous workers and artisans working
on their own. " C'est une tres grande erreur, car les derniers font
seuls un objet de prosperite rationale vraiment important ". The "
fabrique reunie " may enrich one or two entrepreneurs, but the workers
in it will for ever remain wage earners neither concerned with nor benefiting
from the factory as such. In a " fabrique separee " no one will get
rich, but many a worker will be comfortably off, and a few industrious ones
may manage to collect a little capital. Their example will stimulate others
to economy and effort, and thus help them towards advancement. A slight rise
in the wages of a factory worker is of no consequence to the national
economy: " elles ne seront jamais un objet digne de l'interet des
lots." No one was so radical in his demand for State control and
interference with trade as Mably. He particularly advocated control of the
corn trade, and thus made an important contribution to the discussion before
and during the Revolution on this most vital sector of the French economy.
Like Rousseau, he loathed foreign trade. Its sole motives were greed and
luxury. It destroyed the righteous spirit of the virtuous Republic set up by
Calvin, for Calvin's Geneva and Sparta were Mably's and Rousseau's
inspiration. As moral and political considerations were to them at bottom the
same, they viewed economic, especially commercial, expansion as a peril not
only to morals, but also to liberty. Mably regarded commerce as "
essentiellement contraire a ['esprit de tout bon gouvernement ".
Encourage avarice and luxury under the pretext of favouring commerce, and all
laws that you make to strengthen your liberty would not prevent you from
becoming slaves. Mably defiantly asserts that the effect of all his restrictions
will be to benumb and enfeeble (engourdir) men. " C'est ce que je
souhaite, si par cet engourdissement on entend l'habitude qu'ils
contracteront de ne rien desirer au-dela de ce que la Loi leur permet de
posseder." As to the objection that some people would rather flee the
country than submit to laws engendering torpor, Mably's answer is that those
whose passions are too strong to obey salutary laws had better go soon, as
they are enemies of the Republic, its laws and its morals. " But nobody
will flee; the tyranny of a government and magistrates sometimes drive out
people, but just laws, on the contrary, attach them to their country by dint
of their austerity. And so once more the theory has come full circle. The
postulate of liberty should have suggested the release of spontaneity.
Instead, we are faced with the idea of the State acting as the chief
regulator, with the purpose of enforcing ascetic austerity. The initial and
permanent aim was to satisfy man's self-interest, acclaimed as the main and laudable
motive of action, and at the end a brake is imposed on all human initiative.
Liberty has been overcome by equality and virtue; spontaneity and the revolt
against traditional restrictions, by the postulate of the natural social
harmony. There is the same incongruity in eighteenth-century economic
thinking as there is in its approach to political ethics. Eighteenth-century
thinkers spoke the language of individualism, while their preoccupation with
the general interest, the general good and the natural system led to
collectivism. They did not intend men to submit obediently to an external
principle standing on its own, but so to mould man that he would freely come
to think that principle his own. The same applies to the social-economic
sphere. The writers in question certainly abhorred the idea of industrial
concentration, and the vision of great multitudes of workers under the
umbrella of a large State-owned or private concern. That meant slavery and
the degradation of man's~dignity. They wanted to see as many as possible, all
if possible, become free and independent small farmers and artisans. Even
Communists, like Morelly and Mably, considered economic organization in terms
of contributions by individual producers to the public stores, and the distribution
of the products to the individual consumers. Eighteenth-century thinkers
wished somehow to combine etatism and individualism, with the State acting as
a brake upon excesses of inequality, or as regulator and provider, or as the
guarantor of social security to the poor and weak. They lived before the age
of large-scale industry and industrial centralization. Few of them also had
any feeling for the image of a nation engaged in a mighty productive effort.
Man was primarily a moral being to them. Ofthe major Revolutionary figures
Sieyes and Barnave were the first to think in terms of a collective
productive effort. The industrial expansion under Napoleon arid the
Restoration alone gave a great impetus to this line of thought. And yet, the
eighteenth-century restrictionist attitude, essentially sterile and
reactionary, is less interesting and less important for what it says than for
what it fails to say. It fails to run out its course, it halts timidly in the
middle. Impelled by a revolutionary impetus of total renovation, and by the
idea of a society reconstructed deliberately with a view to a logical and
final pattern, it nevertheless shrinks from throwing into the melting-pot the
basis of social relations, property. Eighteenth-century thinkers did much to undermine
the sanctity of property, and tO make the State the chief arbiter in the
economic life. They shrank from drawing the final conclusions and tried to be
as conservative as possible. But the nnpetus of the idea was too strong. The
French Revolution came with its Messianic call and its economic and social
strains and stresses. The awakened masses, carried along by the idea of
universal happiness, could not grasp why the Revolution should be only
political and not social. They could not understand why the Legislator, so
omnipotent in all other spheres, should not have the power to subdue the
selfishness of the rich and to feed the poor, and in general should not be
able to solve the social problem on the pattern of the natural scheme and in
accordance with the " necessity of things ". The very idea of
democracy appeared to imply an ever closer approximation to economic
equality. A purely formal political democracy, without social levelling, had
no me;lllill~ in the eighteenth century, brought up as it was on the ideas of
antiquity. It was a later product. Jacobin dictatorship was caught unprepared
by these whirlwinds. It had to improvise a half-way house. Carried on by the
Messianic urge and their vague vision, the Jacobins, like their
eighteenth-century teachers, lacked the courage to make a frontal attack on
the property system. This is why the " reign of virtue " postulated
by them appears so unsatisfactory and so elusive an ideal as almost to be
meaningless, and why the dictatorial social and economic policies which
necessity imposed upon them were adopted by them with so much reluctance.
Nobody realized better than Saint-Just that an irresistible dynamism was
driving the Jacobins into a direction of which they had hardly dreamt In the
begs ng. As we shall see, Babeuf and Buonarroti discovered that the Jacobin
half-way house was a heart-break house. It was necessary to go the whole way
towards a State-owned and State-directed economy. The solution of the
economic problem was the condition oftheJacobin Republic of Virtue. The
Thermidorian reaction learned a similar lesson from Jacobin dictatorship, but
drew the opposite conclusions: property must become the rock of the social
edifice, and social welfare must be put outside the scope of state politics.
It may be said that the French Revolution followed stage by stage the
teachings of Mably, but in a reverse order. Out of his despair of ever seeing
the solely valid Communist system established, Mably developed a whole series
of practical policies for the state of sin, which had a deep influence upon
the course of the Revolution. Babouvism was a Mablyist conclusion derived
from the failure of these policies, when tried, to solve the problems of
society, and a vindication of Mably's original promise that all reforms would
be ineffective without the abolition of property. Only, while Mably thought
the latter a hopeless dream, Babeuf and his followers resolved that the
Revolutionary changes had brought it into the realm of practical politics,
and that the failure of the Revolutionary palliatives had indeed made it
inescapable. I Mably's political thinking-a subject not within the scope of
this work as such-could be presented as a series of layers, each of which
corresponded to and inspired a particular phase of the Revolution. He laid
down a prophetic blue-print of the initial stage of the Revolution. Accepting
the division of society into estates and classes as an unavoidable evil as
long as men could not " all be brothers ", he foretold that by
reasserting their particular interests and liberties the various orders would
isolate and weaken royal despotism. The Parliaments would become the "
anchor of salvation ", and the crisis forced by them would compel the
King to summon the Estates General. These would establish themselves as a
National Assembly meeting at fixed periods. The Constituante learnt from
Mably the principle of the absolute supremacy of the Legislature over a weak,
despised and always suspect royal executive; and the sacredness of the
principle of parliamentary representation, direct democracy having been
rejected by Mably as a regime which gives rein to an anarchical, capricious
and ignorant multitude. The Jacobins took from Mably, not less than from
Rousseau, their idea of virtuous, egalitarian happiness.

On the very eve of Thermidor Saint-Just brings with him copies of Mably to
the Committee of Public Safety, and distributes them anions his colleagues,
the other dictators of Revolutionary France, in order to win them over
definitely for hisplanofenthroningvirtue, and thereby completing and insuring
the regeneration of the French people, and the emergence of a new type of
society. Finally, Babouvism adopted Mably's Communism, while the
post-Therrnidorian regime based the exclusion of the propertyless from
political life also on Mably's precepts.

(a) THE REVOLUTIONARY ATTITUDE ON the threshold of the French Revolution
the Revolutionary forces found their chief spokesman in Sicyes. The author of
the most successful political pamphlet of all time-the Communist Manifesto,
whatever its delayed influence, had little effect when it appeared-summed up
eighteenth-century political philosophy with a view to immediate and
practical application. For the first time in modem history, and perhaps in
history altogether, a political pamphlet was consciously and enthusiastically
seized upon by statesmen and politicians, indeed by public opinion in the
widest sense of the word, as a complete guide to action; not just as an
analysis of ~ reality by an acute mind, containing wise reflections and
stimulating I ideas, the way in which a political pamphlet would have been
treated in the past. This in itself was an event of incalculable importance.
It was a signal of the new importance acquired by ideas as historic agents.
In the past ideas mattered little as factors in political change. Deeply
rooted respect for tradition and precedent worked for stability and
continuity. Under a traditional monarchy the administration was recruited
from the aristocracy, or civil service families. Government was a question of
management by those to whom it was a traditional occupation. With the
replacement of tradition by abstract reason, ideology and doctrine became
all-important. The ideologists came to the fore. Moreover, ideas had reached
the masses. Statistics have been I adduced to show that the works of the
philosophers were neither widely distributed nor widely read in the years
before the Revolution, and the influence of eighteenth-century ideas upon the
Revolution has been seriously questioned. On becoming acquainted with the
Revolutionary literature one is almost tempted to answer that statistics is
no science. The prevalence of philosophical canon books in libraries or the
number of their actual readers is in reality no index to their influence. How
many people in our own days have actually read the Capital of Marx or the
works of Freud ? Few however would deny that the ideas propagated in these
books have entered contemporary thinking and experience to a degree that
defies measurement. There is such a thing as a climate of ideas, as ideas in
the air. Such ideas reach the half-literate and semi-articulate second, third
or even fourth hand. They nevertheless create a general state of mind.
Tocqueville found many references to the " rights of man " and the
" natural order " in peasant cahiers. From the point of view of
this inquiry Sicyes's writings of. 1788-9 deserve special attention in that
they embody the Revolutionary eighteenth-century philosophy as a still
undivided complex. There is no explicit suggestion of a fissure yet. The
schism into two types of democracy was to develop soon. The question is
whether Sicyes's pamphlets of that period suggest the possibility of a split,
and whether one can discern in them a tension between incompatible elements.
This is not an easy question to answer. It requires a good deal of
detachment. Sieyes's ideas of the early period of the Revolution have become
part and parcel of Western European consciousness and have entered into the
woof of modern liberal-democratic thinking to an extent which makes it
difficult to bring home how revolutionary they were at the time they
appeared, and to realize the far-reaching totalitarian-democratic
potentialities immanent in them. Yet, these very ideas, which became a
landmark in the growth of liberal democracy, were calculated to set the
modern State on the path of totalitarianism. They helped to initiate that
process of ever-growing centralization that leads to the totalitarianism of facts,
towards which the modern State has been moving for the last century and a
half They also marked a decisive advance in the direction of the
totalitarianism of ideas based on an exclusive creed Sieyes's postulate of a
rational regime in place of the slavish acceptance of established and
time-hallowed incoherence, and of; arrangements long void of meaning; his
rejection of the old idea that government was the King's business, while that
of the subjects was to give their loyalty and yield taxes; his condemnation
of privileges; the demand that the Estates General, based on feudal class
distinctions and convoked to help the King to solve the problem I of the
deficit, should give place to a National Assembly representing the sovereign
nation, and called upon to apply its unlimited powers to the total reshaping
of the body politic; Sicyes's raising of the homogeneous nation-above orders
and corporations-to the level of the only real and all-embracing collective
entity-all these ideas now so widely accepted as axiomatic were of the utmost
revolutionary significance at the time, and, moreover, released a dynamic
force, which soon swept beyond the conscious objectives of those who set it
in motion, and is to-day more powerful than ever. The absurdities, incongruities
and abuses of the ancient regime were indefensible. Sieyes's impatience with,
and contempt for, the old parchments, the cult for precedent, the "
extase gothique " of " proof " hunters and timid slaves of
" facts ", cannot fail to win sympathy. -But it must not be
forgotten that this clash of attitudes, stripped of grotesques and stupid,
selfish conservatism, on the one side, and of compelling verve, on the other,
marked the beginning of the fundamental and fateful conflict between two
vital T attitudes, not in the sphere of abstract thought alone, but in the I
realm of practical politics as well. One stands for organic, slow, !
half-conscious growth, the other for doctrinaire deliberateness; one for the
trial-and-error procedure, the other for an enforced solely valid pattern.
The Legislator, writes Sieyes, " dolt se sentir presse de sortir enfin
de l'effroyable experience des siecles . . . enjoin" denser des vrais
principes". There is no respect in this attitude for the wisdom of ages,
the accumulated, half-conscious experience and instinctive ways of a nation.
It shows no awareness of the fact that strictly rationalist criteria of truth
and untruth do riot apply to social phenomena, and that what exists is never
a result of error, accident or vicious contrivance alone, but is a pragmatic
product of conditions, slow, unconscious adjustment, and only partly of
deliberate planning. These are the principles, exclaims Sieyes, or we must
renounce the idea of a social order altogether. When contrasting the character
of an art peculiar to politics (the " social art") with the
descriptive nature of physics, Sieyes foreshadows Marx's famous dictum by
saying of politics that it is " l'art plus hardi darts sa vol. se
propose de plier et d'accommoder les fan's a nos besoins et a nos
jouissances, il demande ce qui dolt etre pour l'utilite des hommes.... Quelle
dolt etre la veritable science, celle des fan's ou celle des principes ?
" This approach determines his judgment of the British Constitution.
That so vaunted chef~'ccavre would not stand an impartial examination by the
principles of a " veritable political order". A product of hazard
and circumstances rather than of lights, " un monument de superstition
gothique" (the House of Lords), in the past regarded as a marvel, it was
in fact nothing but an " echafaudage prodigieux " of precautions
against disorder, instead of being a positive scheme for a true social order.
This type of absolutist approach caused Sieyes to become the first exponent
of what we propose to call the Revolutionary attitude. It is an answer to the
question as to what attitude a Revolution, which claims to realize a solely
valid system, should take to the representatives of the past scheme of
things, and to opposition in general. From one angle, it is the problem of
Revolutionary coercion. Sieyes was clear in his mind that a Revolution had
the characteristics of a civil war, and was in its nature income with
compromise or any kind of give-and-take. The attacked old system and its
representatives benefiting from so many vested interests could not be
expected to dissolve of their own volition. However old and decrepit a man
may be, Sieyes says, he will not willingly abandon his place to a young man.
There must be a removal by force. The representatives of the two privileged
estates, the nobility and clergy, will thus try to distract the attention of
the Third Estate by small concessions such as, for instance, the offer to pay
taxes equal to those paid by the latter. In order to stave off the attack on
their privileges they will talk of the necessity of reconciliation between
the classes. All these ruses, Sieyes insists, must not overshadow the
fundamental fact of the life-and-death struggle between the two systems,
which the new and old social forces represented. The two camps had no common
ground, for there could be no common basis for oppressors and the oppressed.
It was impossible to call a halt in 1789: it was imperative to go either the
whole way, or backward, abolish privileges altogether, or legalize them. It
was impossible to bargain. No class willingly renounces its power and
privileges, and no class can expect fairness or generosity from the other, or
even conformity to some general objective standard. Thus in Sieyes's opinion
the Third Estate could rely only on its own courage and inspiration. "
Scission" was therefore the sole solution: a Revolutionary break and the
total subordination of the few to the many. Furthermore, a Revolution has not
accomplished its task even when it has abolished the powers that be which
prevent the will of the people from being expressed and prevailing, and has
enabled it with no delay or subterfuge of any kind to speak and to fix the
mode of existence it desires. An equally and perhaps more important objective
is to prevent the old system from coming back. The old forces are bound to
try to worm their way back by all means. Sieyes therefore lays down that the
Third Estate shall be barred from sending members of the two privileged
orders as their representatives. Should not, the question may be asked,
people be permitted to act foolishly, if they choose? No, they must not, for
the question of the National Assembly and the general good are involved. It
would, Sicyes maintains, be like electing British Ministers of State to
represent Frenchmen at the French National Assembly, at a time of war. The
nobles are aliens, enemy aliens of the Third Estate, that is to say, of the
French nation, to the same degree as members of the British Cabinet. The
implication of Revolutionary dictatorship is clear. The provision, however
necessary at the moment, may be regarded as a thin end of the wedge pierced
into the framework of popular sovereignty, on the very eve of its triumph.

This is the more remarkable, since the whole burden of Sieyes's case for a
rational principle in politics and for the revolutionary replacement of one
system by another is the theory of the unlimited sovereignty of the people.
The " veritable political order " is realized by the will of the
people becoming the sole source of law, in place of the power of the King and
authority of tradition. When the nation enters upon its own, and assembles to
speak its mind, all established laws and institutions are rendered null and
void. The situation in 1789 was that the King had summoned the Estates
General for a particular purpose-to remedy the deficit; and under certain
conditions and rules-the three orders were according to custom to deliberate
separately. Sicyes urged the Estates General, or at least the Third Estate,
to declare themselves an extraordinary I National Assembly and to act like
men just emerging from the state I of nature and coming together for the
purpose of signing a Social Contract. He thus wanted the Estates (or
Assembly) to act in a Revolutionary way, as if there had been no laws and no
regulations before then. The nation was the sovereign. Once assembled it I
could not be bound by any conditions or prescriptions. It would | be
alienating its very being, if it was. The nation expressed justice I by the
mere fact of its being and willing. " La volonte rationale . . . n'a
besoin que de sa realite." An extraordinary National Assembly, such as
Sieyes wanted the Estates General to become, embodied this national will in
the raw, being not just a representative body, but Rousseau's people in
assembly really; while an ordinary National Assembly laid down by the
constitution created by the Extraordinary Assembly-an ordinary representative
body-would be bound by the rules fixed in the Constitution. The Extraordinary
Assembly may and would, of course, for convenience' sake declare most of the
existing laws valid till their replacement by new ones, but this expedient in
no way affected the principle. Who is the nation ? Sicyes answers: all the
individuals in the forty thousand parishes of France. These individuals,
stripped of all their other attributes and affiliations, like membership of a
class, profession, creed or locality, have the common attribute of
citizenship and the same interest in the common general good. " Les
volontes individuelles vent les seals elements de la volonte commune."
Whoever claimed a position different from that assigned by common citizenship
is the enemy of all other citizens and of the national good. The most
dangerous enemy of the latter is esprit He corps, the sectional interests of
groups, whether these groups were traditional privileged orders, social
classes or corporations with a special status. The existence of groups
implied partial selfish interests. The common national will was formed by the
concurrence of individual wills alone, and was falsified and destroyed,
indeed could not even be brought forth, where sectional interests were
operative. Thus the Estates General in its old composition could not claim to
be more than an " Assemblee clericonobilijudicielle ". It
constituted a body where representatives of three separate nations met, and
negotiated, but could not form one national representation, voicing one
common national and one general interest. So far Sicyes is interpreting
Rousseau. Now the Third Estate-and this is Sicyes's original contribution
occasioned by the all-important controversy of the hour-comprised the
crushing numerical majority of the nation, all those who had no pretensions
to privilege or status different from that implied in common citizenship, all
those, moreover, who by their skill and effort maintained the social fabric.
They were therefore the nation. The privileged orders were aliens, an
encumbrance, an idle limb. The nobles might as well go back to the Franconian
swamps and forests, where they claim to have come from originally, and leave
the freed old Roman stock alone. They would thus seal their claim to be a
superior race. Sicyes's egalitarian conception of a monolithic nation and
unlimited popular sovereignty was an argument for the elimination of feudal
privilege and regional incongruities. It was, however, calculated to open the
way to that democratic centralization, under which the long unhampered arm of
the central power resting on the idea of a single national interest, and
carried by the energy of popular feeling, sweeps away all intermediate
clusters of social activity whether functional, ideological, economic or
local. The problem becomes more acute in the light of Sieyes's two
reservations: first, that the people should not be allowed to act foolishly
against its own interest, and second, that in order that the nation may
become a monolithic entity, nonconforming groups should be eliminated. This
would mean that unlimited popular sovereignty, although in theory resting
with the totality of the nation alone, may come to be redeposited in a part
only of the nation, which claims to constitute Blue real monolithic people,
and to embody the single national interest. According to Sieyes, the basis of
all social order is equality. The sense of equality is also the essence of
happiness, because it silences pretentious pride as well as envy, vanity and
servility. Equality is L a postdate of reason as of justice. The cleavage of
society into r unequal parts, oppressors and oppressed, has come into
existence in contradiction to the dictates of reason and fairness. Sicyes
employs the famous simile of the law as the centre of an immense globe and
the citizens placed, without exception, in the same distance on the circumference.
But here comes the vital shift. The whole trend of thought becomes deflected
by the question of property. it'

(C) PROPERTY The aspects of Sicyes's thought emphasized till now, such as
I the absolutist doctrinaire temperaments Revolutionary coercion. egalitarian
centralism, the conception of a homogeneous nation, contained totalitarian
implications. The question of property pushes Sieyes's ideas back firmly on
the path of liberalism. The law in the focus of his globe must not, he
states, interfere with the citizen's use of his innate or acquired faculties
and more or less favorable chances to increase his possessions. ". . .
N'enfle sa propriete de tout ce que le sort prospere, on un travail plus
fecond pourra y Router, et ne puisse s'elever, dans sa place regale, le
bonheur le plus conforme a ses gouts et le plus digne d'envie." From the
point of view of the law, economic inequality had no more significance than
inequality of height or looks, difference of sex or age Moreover, in the tradition
of Locke, private property is presented by Sicyes as the very essence of
liberty, as only an extension of the property of one's person, and of man's
freedom to employ his faculties and labour. " La propriete des objets
exterieurs on la propriete reelle, n'est pareillement qu'une suite et comme
une extension de la propriete personnelle." The right of first
occupation is, again in the spirit of Locke, only a specific personal right
to the deployment of skill and effort. It gives the first occupant an exclusive
right of ownership, from which others are shut out. The outcome of this
conception of property as a natural right is the liberal conception of the
role of the State: to allow men to follow their economic pursuits, without
hindrance, and to interfere only when an attempt on a man's property is made
by his neighbor. The role of the State is to insure safety; not to grant
rights, but to protect them. " Tous ces individus (on the circumference
of the globe with the law in its centre) correspondent entre eux, ilk
s'engagent, its negocient, toujours sons la garantie commune de la'] loi; si
dans ce mouvement general quelqu'un vent dominer la personne de son voisin ou
usurper sa propriete, la lot commune reprime cet attentat, et remet tout le
monde a la meme distance Belle meme." Only once or twice does Sieyes
seem to reflect uneasily on the advantage unequal property accords to its
owners. On one occasion he remarks that most property was still with the
privileged orders. He hastens, however, to reassure his readers that he has
no intention of touching property. It is a natural right. Sieyes's conception
of property leads him to the most flagrant violation of his egalitarian
principles, even in the political sphere. So eloquent in the condemnation of
privilege and group interests as an insult to human dignity and the immoral
foe of the national interest, Sieyes is brought to make the distinction
between two kinds of rights, natural and civil. Preservation and development
of the natural rights is the purpose for which society has been formed; while
political rights are those by which society is maintained. Hence the
distinction between active and passive citizens. The latter have only natural
rights, the right to the protection of their persons, liberty and property. They
have no part in the formation Of the public powers. This is reserved to the
active citizens alone. 'They alone contribute to the establishment and
maintenance of the public weal. They alone are " les vrais actionnaires
de la grande entreprise sociale ". The term is highly significant.
Society is reinterpreted from a moral and political arrangement based on the
natural rights of man into a joint stock company. Sieyes's conception of
property is more conservative than any so far encountered in this essay. The
reason is not far to seek. The earlier thinkers, spinning their ideas in a
vacuum, with little faith in putting them into practice, could be radical,
although even they flinched from drawing the final conclusion. Sieyes was
writing guides for immediate action. Sieyes, like so many architects of the
Revolution, felt the urgency of reaffirming the sanctity of property while
opening all the other floodgates of the Revolution.

BALANCE OR REVOLUTIONARY PURPOSE- UNDER THE CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY

(a) LEGALITY AND THE SUPREMACY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PURPOSE SIEYES was one
of those who caused the initial absolutist impulse of the Revolution to spend
itself in the abolition of the feudal Monarchy. The shock became so to say
absorbed in a system of balance, established by the Constituent Assembly and
consecrated by the Constitution of 1791. The new order was in a sense the
negation of the basic ideas of a " veritable political order ", in
the name of which the Revolution of 1789 had been accomplished: the sovereignty
of the people and the rights of man. A hereditary Monarchy with the power of
veto was retained, and the poorer strata of the nation were disfranchised.
The idea of a solely valid social order, underlying Sieyes' attitude in
1788-9, gave way to the claim that the Revolution had accomplished its task
in that it had released the social forces, till then suppressed, and created
the conditions for those forces to reach a harmonious balance by themselves.
That a major force, namely the poor, the majority of the nation, had not been
given a chance to enter the contest was conveniently overlooked. The whole
subsequent development of the Revolution may be described as a struggle
between two attitudes, one based on the idea of balance and the newly
established legality, and the other emanating from the idea of the primacy of
the Revolutionary purpose, and implying the legality of Revolutionary
coercion and violence (Jacobinism). Certain dates and e-vents stand out as
decisive in this struggle. The bourgeois system of balance came to an end on
August 10th, 1792, as a result of an armed coup by the disfranchised elements
under the leadership of the Insurrectionary Paris Commune. The coup was
carried out in the name of the primacy of the Revolutionary purpose, against the
established legal authorities, above all the Legislative Assembly, which had
been elected on the basis of a property qualification. The Monarchy, which
had never recovered from the shock it had received as a result of the King's
fight a year earlier, was abolished. The distinction between active and
passive citizens ceased to exist. The last remaining feudal dues, which the
Constituent Assembly had retained on the grounds that they were derived from
property relations and not from personal dependence, were soon finally
annulled. The last conclusions were thus drawn from the original premises of
the Revolution of 1789, which had been whittled down into the Constitutional
Monarchical and bourgeois compromise: the undisputed supremacy of popular
sovereignty, and the equal rights of man. It could thus be said that the
Revolutionary purpose, which was enthroned by the unlawful events of August,
1792, the brief dictatorship of the Commune, the massacres of September,
1792, and the Ministry of Danton, was embodied in these two ideals. The same
could not be said about the Revolutionary purpose which, on June 2nd, 1793,
led to the attack on the Convention, culminating in the expulsion of the
Girondist deputies. The latter had been duly elected on a free ballot, and
till a very short time earlier commanded the majority of the Convention. The
Jacobin Revolutionary purpose in this case was the salvation of the
Revolution. The Revolution meant to the Jacobins the Republic one and
indivisible, and the defense of the welfare of the masses, menaced by
tendencies running counter to their ideological and administrative
centralization, and aiming at the preservation of established economic
(bourgeois) interests. The dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety and
the declaration of the Revolutionary Government which followed the June coup
implied the claim that at that stage the Revolutionary purpose had come to be
embodied in a single party, Jacobinism, representing the true will and the
real interest of the people, or rather the popular masses. The terrorist
Jacobin political and economic dictatorship was an improvisation precipitated
by war,-economic emergency internal treason and party strife. With the
passing of the imminent military danger, and the destruction of the Enrages
llebertists and Dantonists, the first two groups representing anarchical
social violence, and the latter a wish for a return to legality and some form
of balance, the dictatorial regime should have come to an end. The
Revolutionary purpose, which was its justification, seemed realized with the
defeat of its enemies. Robespierrist dictatorship and terror continued. The
question of the Revolutionary purpose, involving the question of the purpose
of the terror, assumed thus a new and vital significance. It could no longer
be summed up as unrestricted popular sovereignty. Social policies alone and
as an end in themselves did not exhaust it either. It thus came to signify
the reign of virtue, the idea of an exclusive and final scheme of things. But
this conception was not something new or improvised. It was there in
Jacobinism from the start, as a postulate. It only reached self awareness
during the regime of terror, to Hash at once with the ideas of liberty and
popular self ¿expression, values with which it had for a long time been
identified, to be soon defeated on Thermidor gth by a reaction reasserting
the idea of balance, and to re-emerge in a flicker of total self-awareness in
the plot of Babeuf in 1796. ... (is) JACOBINISM-MENTAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ELEMENTS
The driving power of Jacobinism, or as for the purposes of this study it
would be more correct to say, !Robespierrism, was the vague, mystical idea
that the way to a natural rational and final order of things had been opened
by the French Revolution. " Nous voulons, en un mot, remplir les vccux
de la nature, accomplir les destine de l'humanite, tenir les promesses de la
philosophic, absoudre la providence du long regne du crime et da la
tyrannic." This Messianic attitude of Robespierre and his followers must
be constantly borne in mind, otherwise the whole significance of I Jacobinism
will be lost. It was incompatible with the acceptance of the theory of
balance, and implied an absolute, dynamic purpose, to be pursued in all
circumstances, and imposed. For the understanding ofJacobinism it is vital to
remember that abstract, collective concepts were to them not abridgments,
combinations of ideas, or guiding maxims, but almost tangible and visible
things, truths that stand on their own and compel acceptance. " Eternal
principles ", the " natural order ", " the reign of
virtue " had an all-important meaning to Robespierre and Saint1ust, just
as such concepts as " classless society ", " the leap from the
realm of necessity to the realm of freedom " have to an orthodox
Marxist. Hence disagreement could not be considered by them as mere
difference of opinion, but appeared as crime and perversion, or at least
error. It was usual for Robespierre to preface his statements with the
explicit premise that as there could be only one morality and one human
conscience, he felt sure that his opinion was that of the Assembly. In his
famous clash with Guadet on the subject of Providence and Divinity
Robespierre declared that believing, as he did, that all patriots had the same
principles, it was impossible that they should not admit the eternal
principles voiced by him. " Quand j'aurai termine . . . je suds sur que
M. Guadet se rendra lui-meme a mon opinion; yen atteste et son patriotisme et
sa gloire, chases vaines et sans fondement, si elles ne s'appuyaient sur'les
verites immuables que je viens de proposer." In the circumstances such
words were, of course, tantamount to blackmail. This mental attitude was
interwoven with certain psychological peculiarities. Robespierre was quite
incapable of separating the personal element from differences of opinion.
That every polemical argument became in Robespierre's mouth a torrent of
personal denunciation may be explained by his implicit conviction that as
there is only one truth, he who disagreed with it was prompted by evil
motives. But less explicable seems Robespierre's habit of declaring himself a
victim of persecution, of embarking upon a dirge of self-pity and of invoking
death as solace, every time he was opposed. Here we are faced with a
paranoiac streak, a strange combination of a most intense and mystical sense
of mission with a self-pity that expressed itself in an obsessive
preoccupation with martyrdom, death and even suicide. It is the psychology of
the neurotic egotist, who must impose his will-rationalized into divine
truth-or wallow in an ecstasy of self-pity. The refusal of the world to
submit becomes to such a nature a source of endless anguish, usually
rationalized into a Weltschmerz. At every setback or humiliation, the world
grows instantly dark, deformed and contorted with pain. Its order begins to
appear wrong beyond remedy, and all men banded together in an evil plot. A
similar mentality is discernible in Saint-Just, Robespierre's junior
colleague, the philosopher of Jacobin dictatorship, I and one of its most
formidable representatives. After the failure to get elected to the
Legislative Assembly in 1792, because he had not yet reached the prescribed
age of twenty-five, Saint-Just wrote this passionate, astounding letter:
" I have been impelled by a republican fever that devours and eats me
up. You will find me great some day . . . I have a feeling that I can soar
above the rest in this age. Adieu ! I am above misfortune. I will bear
everything, but I will tell the truth. You are all cowards, you have not
appreciated me. My palm will rise nevertheless and perhaps obscure yours.
Infamous creatures that you are. I am a rogue, a rascal, because I have no
money to give you. Tear out my heart and devour it; you will become what you
are not. Great ! O God ! Must Brutus languish forgotten, far from Rome ! My
decision is made meanwhile. If Brutus does not kill the rest, he will kill
himself." At a later date, as one of the dictators of France, Saint-Just
wrote that on the day he would become convinced that it was impossible to
give the French people " mceurs douces, energiques, sensibles et
inexorables pour la tyrannic et ['injustice", he would stab himsel¿C ¿
Few confessions could equal the one found in SaintJust's Institutions
Repu~blicaines. A youth of barely twenty-si3;, compelled to " isolate
himself from the world ", he " throws his I anchor into the future,
and presses posterity to his heart ". God, the protector of innocence
and virtue, had sent him on the perilous mission of unmasking perverse men
surrounded by fame and fear He was destined to pUt crime into chains, and to
make men practice | virtue and probity. "J'ai laisse derriere moi toutes
ces faiblesses, je n'ai vu que la verite dans l'univers, et je l'ai cite. Les
circumstances ne vent difficiles que pour ceux qui reculent devant le
tombeau. Je "'implore, le tombeau, comme un bienfait de la Providence,
pour n'etre pas temoin de l'impunite des forfeits ourdis contre ma patrie et
l'humanite. Certes, c'est quitter peu de chose qu'une vie malheureuse, dans
laquelle on est condamme a vegeter le complice ou le temoin impuissant de
crime . . . Je meprise la poussiere qui me compose et qui vous parle; on
pourra la persecuter et faire mourir cette poussiere. Mais je defie qu'on
m'arrache cette vie independante que je me suds donne dans les siecles et
dans les cieux." The breath-taking incongruity between the invocation to
death as solace and the role of executioner-in-chief of the author is only
equalled by another strange contrast, that between Saintlust's atrocious
denunciations of opponents and his sentimental declamations. The terrible
indictment of Danton opens with the uncanny enunciation: " il y a
quelque chose de terrible dans ['amour sacre de la patrie, il est tellement
exclusif, qu'il immole tout saris pitie, sans frayeur, sans respect humain, a
l'interet public." In another speech the Republic is said never to be
safe as long as a single opponent is left alive, and the sword is brandished
against not only the opponents, but also the "indifferents ". But
this does not prevent Saint-Just from weaving the blissful dream of a cottage
on the banks of a river, from appealing to Frenchmen to lox e and respect
each other, and from imploring the Government to let everyone find his own
happiness. This is a self-righteous mentality which is quite incapable of
self-criticism, divides reality into watertight compartments and adopts
contradictory attitudes to the same thing, making judgment wholly dependent
on whether it is " me ", by definition representing truth and
right, or the opponent who is associated with it. I:.

(c) THE DEFINITION OF THE GENERAL WILL The Jacobin absolute purpose was
not to be imposed externally. It was held to be immanent in man and sure to
restore to man his rights and freedoms. It was realizable only in the
collective experience of active popular self ¿expression. Jacobinism was not
satisfied with acquiescence. It insisted on active participation, and
condemned neutrality or indifference as vicious egoism. Jacobinism did not
ask for obedience, it wanted to exact living, active communion with the
absolute purpose. Robespierre declared it to be the duty of every man and
citizen to contribute as much as was in his power to the success of the
sublime undertaking of the Revolution: the re-establishment of the
inalienable rights of man, which is the sole object of society, and the sole
legitimate motive of revolutions. Man must sacrifice his personal interest to
the general good. He must, so to say, bring to the common pool the part of
public force and of the people's sovereignty which he holds, " on Lien
il dolt etre exclu, par cela meme, du pacte social". Needless to add
that whoever wants to retain unjust privileges and distinctions incompatible
with the general good, and whoever wants to arrogate to himself new popovers
at the expense of public liberty, is the enemy of the nation and of humanity.

This was the central problem of Jacobinism: the dilemma of the single
purpose and the will of men. It could be defined as the problem of freedom,
conformity and coercion in a regime which claims to achieve two incompatible
aims, Liberty, and an exclusive form of social existence. It is at bottom
Rousseau's problem of the general will, with an equally strong emphasis placed
on active and universal participation in willing the general will as on the
exclusive nature of the general will. Saint-Just came to grips with the issue
in a striking passage at the end of his remarkably moderate, even complacent
exposition of the Revolutionary ideals in his book of 1791, L'Esprit de la
Revolution et de la Constitution (of 1791). He sets out there to answer a
presumed challenge as to whether the new Constitution was the will of all.
Saint-Just's answer is firmly negative. It would be impossible he goes on to
say, that the change of the Social Contract should not divide into two camps,
the " fripons " or the egoists, who stand to lose by the change,
and the unfortunates who were oppressed under the old compact. But it would
be an inadmissible abuse of the letter of the law to consider the resistance
of some criminals as a part of the national will, since such resistance could
not claim to be a legitimate opposition. Saint-Just goes much further. As a
general rule, he declares, every will, even the sovereign will, inclined to
perversion, is nil. Rousseau had not said all, when he described the general
will as- incommunicable, inalienable, eternal. The general will, to be such,
must also be reasonable. In this respect Saint-Just quite mistakenly "
corrects" Rousseau. The author of the Social Contract did not intend to
say anything different from what Saint Just goes on to say, namely, that a
will may be tyrannical, even if willed by all, and that it would be no less
criminal for the sovereign to be " tyrannized by himself" than by
others. For in this case, the laws flowing from an impure source, the people
would be licentious, and each individual would be both a tyrant and a slave.
" La libertc' d'un peuple mauvais est une perfidie generale, qui
n'attaquant plus le droit de tous ou la souverainete morte, attaque la nature
qu'elle represente." The objective content is equally essential for the
concept of liberty. " Liberte ! Liberte sacree ! "-exclaims
SaintJust-" tu serais peu de chose parmi les hommes, si tu ne les
rendais qu'heureux, mais tu les rappelles a leur origine et les rends a la
vertu." Liberty deserves to be loved only to the extent that it leads
" to simplicity through the power of virtue ". Otherwise liberty is
nothing but " the art of human pride ". Clearly, the spontaneously
expressed will of man or people cannot as such claim to be taken for granted
as the exercise of sovereignty. All depends on its objective quality, on its
conforming to the general good, the reasonable general will, and virtue; all
three in fact meaning the same thing, an objective standard. Who is to define
it ? By what is it to be recognized ?, How rigid or how flexible a-standard
is it l~:elv to bet Tllese are the vital, but unanswered, questions. At a later
date in the debate on the Constitution of 1793, SaintJust enunciated a
totally different definition of the general will and one which shows an
unmistakable awareness of the dangers irreverent in the earlier conception.
Saint-Just seemed now to remove all objective quality from the general will,
reducing the question to a matter of counting votes and interests, all of
which are explicitly recognized as valid. Moreover, the postulate of
objectivity is violently assailed. " La volonte generate, proprement cite,
et dans la langue de la liberte, se forme de la majorite des volontes
particulieres, individuellement recueillies sans une influence etrangere; la
loi, ainsi former, consacre . . . l'interet general, de la majorite des
volontes a du resulter celle des interets." Saintlust condemns the
substitution of what he calls " a speculative will " for the real
general will, of the philosophical view (" vues de ['esprit") for
the interests of the corps social. " Les lois etaient ['expression du
gout plutot que de la volonte generate." Thus if the actual, expressed
will of the people is not taken for the general will, and some allegedly
objective, external idea is proclaimed to constitute the general will, the
general will becomes depraved. Liberty no longer belongs to the people. It
becomes a law alien to public prosperity. This is Athens voting at its
twilight,without democracy, the loss of its freedom. This idea of liberty,
Saint-Just declares, if it prevails, will banish freedom for ever. He goes on
to make an eloquent and terrible prophecy, which events vindicated tO the
letter. `' Cette liberte sortira du cceur et deviendra le gout mobile de
['esprit; la liberte sera concrete sons toutes les formes de gouvernement
possibles; car dans ['imagination, tout perd ses formes naturelles et tout
s'altere, et l'on y cree des libertes comme les yeux creent des figures dans
les nuages . . . Dans vingt ens le trdne soit retabli par les fluctuations et
les illusions Fortes a la volonte generate devenue speculative."

It took less than twenty years for Napoleon to make the claim that he
embodied the general will of the French nation and to find theoretical
support for it. I Where does Saint-Just after all take his stand ? Is the
general will to him what is actually willed by the people in flesh, whatever
its contents, " la volonte materielle du people, sa volonte
simultanee", the aim of which, as he says, is to consecrate the active
interest of the greater number, and not their passive interest ? Or I does
the general will need the attribute of objective truth to become the general
will, in which case the actual count of votes takes a second place behind the
objective doctrine embodied in the Enlightened ? Neither Robespierre nor
Saintlust ever stated their position quite unequivocally, but the latter
attitude is implicit in their whole approach. As will be shown, Saint Just箂
definition of the general will, made in the course of the Constitutional
debate in 1793, came not as an answer to the challenge of a "
speculative " idea claiming to constitute the general will, but as an
argument in a debate on the mode of organizing the expression of popular
sovereignty. Robespierre's insistence on the exclusion of those who do not
bring with them to the common pool and common effort their part of popular
sovereignty, is a clear indication of his attitude. It is proposed to examine
in the coming pages the development of the Jacobin attitude on this point
throughout the Revolution I as illustrated by the thought of the two leading
and most representative figures of Jacobin dictatorship, Robespierre and
Saintlust. (d) THE IDEA OF BALANCE-SAINT-JUST The evolution of Robespierre's
thinking on this matter is more interesting and more elaborate than that of
Saintlust. He wrestled with the problem for a much longer time than his
younger friend, who, when he arrived on the central Revolutionary scene,
found the dilemma largely resolved by circumstances. Robespierre was active
at the centre of affairs from the very earliest days of the Revolution. Up to
the period of the Convention Saint-Just was only an impatient onlooker of the
great events from his native little town, and no more than a local
Revolutionary activist. This may explain why in the case of Robespierre the
outline of his future intellectual development is discernible quite early,
whereas in the case of Saint-Just the passage from complacency in his book of
1791 to Revolutionary dictatorial extremism in 1793 appears abrupt and almost
unexpected. Saint-Just made the passage from obscurity to supreme power in
one leap. A fundamental difference between Robespierre and Saint-Just is
revealed by a comparative analysis of their views in the preConvention
period. In spite of the far-reaching totalitarian implications of Saint Just箂
above quoted definition of the general will, contained in his book on the
1791 Constitution, the underlying attitude of the work is the orthodox view
of the day that the I Revolution had been accomplished in the sense that it
had liberated the social forces and enabled them to set themselves freely
into a harmonious pattern, the essence of which is balance. Robespierre was
never prepared to adopt this approach. To him the aim of the Revolution had
not been achieved by giving the social and political forces a free play to reach
a balance. He was not prepared to be content with letting the forces out and
watching them. His whole attinlde is dominated by the idea of a dynamic
purpose. The Revolution constitutes the unfolding of this purpose. There is
no question of a balance of forces. The decisive fact is the deadly struggle
between two forces, Revolution and counter-revolution, -hick between
themselves sum up the whole of reality. " The omission of what you could
do would be a betrayal of | trust . . . a crime of lese-nation and
lese-humanity. More than that: if you do not do all for Liberty, you have not
done a thing. There are no two ways of being free: either you are entirely
free or return to be a slave. The slightest opening left to despotism w511
re-establish soon its power"-declared Robespierre in the debate in the
Constituante on the franchise on August IIth, 1791, when hotly opposing the
followers of the ideology of equilibrium, who adopted the mare d'argent as a
qualification for eligibility to the Legislative Assembly. It may be
convenient to throw a glance at Saint-Just's ideas in 1791 first, before
proceeding to Robespierre. The contrast between the idea of balance and of
Revolutionary purpose will thus be brought into sharp relief. Saint-Just
speaks in glowing approval of the 1791 principles. I France had produced a
synthesis (coalise,) of democracy (e'tat civil), I aristocracy The
legislative power), and monarchy (executive). In the best tradition of
Montesquieu, Saint-Just explains that a large country like France must have a
monarchical regime, as a republic would not suit it. At all events, the new
Constitution was the nearest possible approximation in the conditions of
France to a popular regime, with a minimum of monarchy, notwithstanding the
formal supremacy of the executive power, necessitated also incidentally by
the people's love for the King. The new regime appears to Saint-Just to be
eminently safe because of the essential sanity of the French people:
presumption, which characterizes the English people and prevents the
establishment of democracy in England, is not the principle of French
democracy; violence is not the essence of French aristocracy; and justice,
not caprice, is the characteristic of the new French monarchy. " Le chef
d'aeuvre de l' Assemblee Nationale est d' avoir tempers cette
democratic." The golden balance, the right measure between a popular and
despotic regime, has been achieved. The nation has been given the degree of
liberty necessary to its sovereignty, legislation has become popular through
equality, and the monarchy had retained only enough power to be a vehicle of
justice. " The legislators of France have devised the wisest
equilibrium." Wisdom could not place too strong a barrier between the
Legislative and Executive. But the deliberations of the Legislature should be
submitted for royal acceptance so that the particular interests of the two
powers should cancel each other out. An eye watching over the lawgiver
himself, a power able to arrest his arm, is needed. This role can best be performed
by an executive-head who does not change, and is the repository of laws and
principles, which the instability of the legislators should not be allowed to
upset. It would be absurd to consult the people in these deliberations,
because of the slowness of the procedure, the people's lack of prudence, and
its vulnerability to evil influences. " Where the feet think, the arm
deliberates, the head marches." This is indeed | out of tune with the
plebiscitary tendencies of the 1793 Constitution. The judiciary, the best
regulated and most passive organ of the State, should be vested with the
supervision of the exercise of sovereignty. Saint-Just's views on equality in
1791 are particularly significant Complete equality like that established by
Lycurgus-an equality suitable for the poverty of a republic-would produce a
revolution I or engender indolence in a country like France. The land would
have to be divided and industry suppressed. A free industry was however the
source of political rights, and inequality in fact has always given birth to
an ambition that is " vertu " in itself. There is no social harmony
with all men socially and economically equal. Natural equality would confuse
society. There would be no authority, no obedience, and the people would flee
to the desert. I While abolishing abuses, the legislators have wisely
respected interests. " Et l'on a Lien fait; la propriete rend l'homme
soigneux: elle attache les cccurs ingrate a la patrie." | As to
political equality-the only form of equality suitable for I France, a country
built on commerce-its essence lies not in equal strength, but in the
individual's having an equal share in the sovereignty of the people. Unlike
Robespierre, Saint-Just nevertheless fully approves the division into active
and passive citizens. The completely indigent class who would be classified
as passive citizens and deprived of franchise is not large and would not be
condemned to sterility, and the Constitution would benefit by not becoming
too popular and anarchical. Possessed of independence and a chance of
emulation, the poor will enjoy the social rights of natural l I equality,
security and justice. The legislators had taken a wise course in not
humiliating the poor, while making opulence unnecessary. It did not occur to
Saint-Just or to most of his contemporaries to inquire how many people were
to be disfranchised under the scheme. He is content to observe that the
inequality established by the division into active and passive citizens does
not offend natural rights, but only social pretensions. Saint-Just's analysis
of the problem of the individual versus the State anticipates Benjamin
Constant's distinction between the legislators of antiquity and the spirit of
modern liberty. The ancients wished that the happiness of the individual
should be derived from the well-being of the State, the moderns have an
opposite attitude. The ancient State was based upon conquest, because it seas
small and surrounded by inimical neighbors, and the fate of the individuals
thus depended on the fortunes of the republic. ! The vast modern State has no
ambitions beyond self-preservation and the happiness of its individual
citizens. Following -Rousseau closely, Saint Just declares that the severity
of the laws should correspond inversely to the size of the territory. The
Rights of Man would have proved the undoing of such small city-republics Las
Athens or Sparta. France, who has renounced conquests, is strengthened by the
Rights of Man. " Ici la patrie s'oublie pour ses enfants." The future
prophet of the " swift sword " cannot forgive Rousseau his
justification of the death penalty. " Quelque veneration que m'impose
l'autorite de J. J. Rousseau, je ne te pardonne pas, o grand homme, d'avoir
justifie le droit de mort." For if the right of sovereignty cantos be
transferred, no more can man's right over his own life. Before passing a
death sentence, the Social Contract should be altered, because the crime on
which sentence was given was the result of an alteration in the contract. A
repressive force cannot be a social law. As soon as the Social Contract is
perverted, it becomes null and void, and then the people must assemble and
form a new Social Contract for its regeneration. The Social Contract is,
according to Rousseau, made for the preservation of the partners; indeed, but
for their conservation by vertu and not by force, says Saint-Just. In the
circumstances of 1791 Saint-Just had no perception that his theory of balance
was in the long run hardly compatible with his idea of the predicated general
will. At all events, he presupposed an extremely wide area of common
agreement, and consequently the margin of illegitimate opposition WE thought
by him to be so narrow as not to deserve serious attention As the common
area, upon which the play of social forces could be allowed to move, grew
narrower, the predicated general will became more rigidly defined, and the
exclusions more numerous

At first, the dynamic purpose of the Revolution was to Robes Pierre the
unhalted advance towards the complete realization of, the democratic ideal.
Freedom of man and unrestricted popular sovereignty were supreme purposes. In
the earlier phase of the Revolution, Robespierre was profoundly convinced
that the people's I will, if allowed free, genuine and complete expression,
could not I fail to prove identical with the true general will. "
L'interet do people c'est le Lien public . . . pour etre bon, le people n'a
besot que de se preferer lui meme a ce qui n'est pas lui." With thi,
conviction of Robespierre's went the all-pervading consciousness of a deadly
struggle between the popular Revolutionary purpose anvil the forces opposed
to it, which could not be resolved by compromise, but only by total victory
and subordination. The liberation of man; the dignity of the human person;
government of the people, by the people, and for the people-meant things very
real to Robespierre. They were almost tangible, visible objects to him. There
is a ring of genuine fervor in Robespierre's condemnation of the traditional
distinction between rulers and subjects, ruling classes and oppressed
classes, and in his impatient anger with snobbish pretensions, and with
contempt for those beneath oneself It is important to emphasize that, like
Rousseau, Robespierre, when speaking of man's dignity and freedom, means -
the absence of personal dependence, in other words, equality. Rousseau had
said that man should be as independent as possible of any other person, and
as dependent as possible on the State. uman dignity and rights are degraded,
when man has to acknowledge another man as his superior, but not in equal
dependence of all on the collective entity, or the people, on ourselves in
brief. Throughout the ages, Robespierre says, the art of government was I
employed for the exploitation and subjugation of the many by the few. Laws
were designed to perfect these attempts into a system. ~ All the legislators,
instead of endeavoring-to release the popular I forces and satisfy their
longing for freedom, dignity, happiness and I self-government, have always
thought in terms of governmental power. Uppermost in their minds were
precautions against popular I discontent and insurrection, convinced as they
were that the people I are by definition bad and mutinous. " L'ambition,
la force et la | perfidie ant ete les legislateurs . . . asservi
raison." They proclaimed reason to be nothing but folly, equality to be
anarchy. e vindication of natural rights became to them rebellion, and ~
nature was ridiculed as a chimera. " C'est avous maintenant de faire I
la votre, c'est a dire de rendre les hommes heureux et libres par vos
lots." Robespierre denounced all references to the Roman tribunate. This
ancient and so much vaunted institution implied the people's bondage. As if
the people needed special advocates to plead on its behalf before some
superior powers and a higher tribunal ! The people had no desire of going on
strike on the Mountain, and wait there till its grievances had been answered.
The people was the master in its own house, and not a client or upplicant. It
intended to stay in Rome and expel the tyrants. and so we see Robespierre
almost alone in the Constituent Assembly fighting for universal suffrage.
There was no stronger advocate of the principle of popular election of all
officers of State, administrative, judicial and other. He laid the greatest
emphasis upon the spread of political consciousness in the masses, and
encouraged its expression through the various channels-popular societies, the
press, petitions, public discussions, demonstrations, and even extra-legal
direct action by the people. Robespierre's determined stand against the-
death penalty and his fervent defense of the unrestricted freedom of the
press were not only a struggle for values good in themselves, but a fight
against the instruments of traditional governmental tyranny, and for means of
popular self-expression. It was in the very nature of a government " not
of the people " never to be satiated with power. Every government "
not of the people " was a vested interest against the people. The evils
of society never come from the people, always from the government. " C'
est dans la vertu et dans la souverainete du people qu' it faut chercher un
preservatifcontre les vices et le despotisme du gouvernement." The first
object of a Constitution is to protect the people from its own government and
their abuses. Robespierre was of course out of tune with Montesquieu's idea
of the Separation of powers, reaffirmed by the Constituent Assembly. For
whatever the Constitutional devices for subordinating the Execut*e to the
Legislature adopted by the Assembly, there remained nevertheless in the 1791
Constitution the fact of a permanent head of the Executive, unelected,
primeval, so to say, in the same way as the people was in regard to the
Legislative power. The British system appeared to Robespierre a fraud and a
plot against the people. In the past, in the era of bondage, the idea may
have been to temper tyranny by creating tension between the various
governmental agencies and sowing discord among the various powers. But the
aim of the Revolution was to extirpate tyranny altogether, and to let the
people rule. Robespierre was at heart a Republican before he ever knew it.
Robespierre was filled with a constant anxiety not to allow the agencies of
power to fall into the hands of the Executive. In those hands they were bound
to become anti-popular counterrevolutionary forces. There could be little
hesitation for him as to what attitude to take up on such questions as the
royal veto and the royal sanction for Legislative decrees. In his
determination to neutralize the Executive's power to do harm, Robespierre
fought to deprive the King of every possible prerogative. This was
consistently his line on every issue that came up in the great constitutional
debates of 1791 on the reform of the French State. He was, for instance,
against the royal command of the National Guards. He violently condemned the
employment of the old Markhaussee and its officers, recruited from the Armee
de tigne under royal command, for police duties and functions of justice of
the peace (regular judges of the peace were to be elected). Robespierre
demanded that military courts be composed of an equal number of officers and
men, for otherwise the courts martial, consisting of officers alone, would be
punishing patriotic soldiers, under the guise of penalties for indiscipline.
In all the incidents which occurred in the first two or three years of the
Revolution between popular demonstrations and the police Robespierre
invariably took the side of the former, accusing the authorities and the
police of counter-revolutionary designs, provocation or ill-will. As if by
definition any popular riot was the expression of the people's righteous
anger, and every action of the authorities counter I revolutionary. The
question as to who is- the nation, and who is not " of the nation
", whether the nation is the sum total of persons born on French soil, a
community of faith, or is equivalent to the people as a social category, is
not yet decided. It was to unfold itself gradually. But already at the time
Robespierre's conception of the nation had no room for corporate bodies. The
nation, as Rousseau and Sieyes had taught, recognized no other components
than individuals. The nation thus composed was a collective and yet
monolithic personality, with one interest and one general will. Corporate
bodies equated with partial wills were not " of the nation". They
were directly opposed to, or at least at variance with, the general good.
Although not a militant anti-clerical, Robespierre would not thus allow the
Church to continue as a separate corporation. He supported the idea of
clerical marriage, and insisted that bishops should be elected not by the
clergy alone, but, like any other public servants, by the people of the
diocese, spiritual and lay. Robespierre demanded guarantees that the National
Guards not only would not fall under the control of the administration, but
would be prevented from forming an esprit de corps. Officers were to be
changed every two years. External marks were not to be worn off duty.
Robespierre demanded an elected jury for civil cases in the same way as for
criminal cases because he feared the esprit de corps which a professional
body of judges was bound to develop. Robespierre made no protest against the
ban on trade unions in the famous Loi Le Chapelier promulgated in defense of
the homogeneity of the national will and the notional interest. It was only
gradually that Robespierre came to brand a social class as being not "
of the nation ". Sieyes had condemned the privileged orders for placing
themselves outside the national community. After the abolition of feudal
privileges, it became a sign of good Revolutionary sentiment to emphasize the
unity of the French nation and to depreciate anything that might discriminate
for or against any part of the community by assigning to it a special status.
The French nation was composed of Frenchmen, and not of classes or castes.
Even before this principle was finally violated by the disfranchisement of
the poorer classes, Robespierre became acutely aware of the fact that
national unity was giving way to a split into two warring social classes, the
haves and the have-nots. He was at first desperately anxious to prevent it,
not only by vehement opposition to the mare d'argent. He fought for the
admission of the poor into the National Guard, insisted on the eligibility of
the poor as members of jury, made a determined and successful stand against a
ban on petitions by passive citizens. He repeatedly warned the Assembly that
if the agencies of power were to be reserved to one class, they would
inevitably become instruments of class domination and oppression. France
would become divided into two separate nations, and the subjugated people
would feel no obligation to their country. They would become aliens. He
scoffed the defenders of the mare d'argent, attributing to them the idea that
" human society should be composed exclusively of proprietors, to the
exclusion of men ". Robespierre was to go throb a fateful evolution in
this respect. Having started with passionate opposition to the exclusion of
the lower strata from the body of the sovereign and politically active
nation, an opposition based on the idea of the sacred and equal rights of
man; he finished by declaring the popular masses alone the nation, and by
virtually outlawing the rich, if not the bourgeoisie as a whole. The "
nation " came to be identified with the " people ", "
this large and interesting class, hitherto called ' the people ' . . . the natural
friend and the indispensable champion of liberty . . . neither corrupted by
luxury, nor depraved by pride, nor carried away by ambition, nor troubled by
those passions which are inimical to equality . . . generous, reasonable,
magnanimous and moderate . Far from accepting the idea of equilibrium between
the social forces, Robespierre labours under an acute awareness of a mortal
struggle which is being waged with no respite. The counterrevolution is
conceived by him as an actual, or latent, permanent conspiracy. It is lurking
in the dark corners, scheming, plotting, waiting only for an opportunity,
insidiously preparing its forces. Robespierre cannot help viewing every
issue, even prima facie a neutral problem, from the same and sole angle of
the opportunities it offers, and the perils it holds out, to either of the
two combatants. Whatever widens the area of popular sovereignty and democracy
is a gain for the Revolution, a position won on the road to victory, a defeat
and loss to the counter-revolution. All the same, although Robespierre has a
permanent dynamic objective, and not just a pragmatic party programme, he is
also a tactician. In a war the objective is fixed, but the tactics may
change. No tactical move should be judged in isolation and on its own; the
wider context is what determines the significance as well as the moral
character of a particular move. And so Robespierre, the tactician, at times
considers a slight retreat an improvement of the democratic position. He
declared himself the defender of the Constitution of 1791, many provisions of
which he had originally opposed bitterly. He frowned upon premature
Republican propaganda. A believer in popular direct action, he is conscious
of the ambushes and provocations that the counter-revolution is scheming, end
wares the people not to expose itself, while the enemy is too strong, to the
charge of anarchy, calling for suppression by police action. Robespierre may
be regarded as the father of the theory which operates with the basic
distinction between a people's war and a counter-revolutionary war. Brissot
and the Girondists wanted war, because they hoped that a national emergency,
heightened by proselytizing enthusiasm, would sweep away all
counter-revolutionary sentiment and plotting, unite the nation, and then
carry the Revolution across Europe. True to his general line of thought,
Robespierre judged the question of war from the angle of the irreconcilable
conflict between Revolution and counter-revolution. It seemed to him clear
that in the case of war, the armed forces, the concentration of wartime
powers, the patriotic anxiety and pride engendered by a national emergency,
were bound to be utilized by the counterrevolution as weapons to crush the
Revolution, in alliance with foreign courts. Robespierre himself would- have
liked to turn the war into a people's war, that is, into an opportunity for
the establishment of a popular regime based on Revolutionary stringency and
military discipline. This could open the way to purges, and to a complete reshuffling
of the officer corps and the administration, and perhaps sweep away the
throne altogether. Robespierre never ceased to think and feel that " if
we do not destroy them, they will a~mihilate -us ". " They "
were not necessarily men, individuals, although the tone of violent personal
invective and denunciation is I calculated to suggest this, but a criminal
system as such, collective forces, of which the individual criminal was only
a representative sample. Thus after the flight of the King, Robespierre is
less concerned with the King's actual offense than with the lesson of more
general significance contained in the flight: the fact that Louis could not
have made his escape, if there had been no powerful forces to encourage and
help him. The-existence and strength of these forces, just revealed, was what
mattered most in Robespierre's opinion. This attitude determined
Robespierre's conception of justice as it found an expression in his speeches
on the reform of the judicial system. and above all on the trial of the King.
The problem is of fundamental importance. Is there such a thing as objective,
independent justice based upon a code that has nothing to do with the tug of
war between contending social and political forces; and employs the sole criterion
of strict evidence ? Or is justice to be considered in reference to the
political struggle that is on, as a weapon of the victorious party ?
Robespierre clearly inclined to the latter conception. It was not cynicism on
his part, not a disbelief In objective justice altogether. On the contrary He
was only convinced that all justice was, in the widest sense of the word,
embodied in one party, and none in the other, by definition. The question of
evidence was really secondary. Whether the actual crime was actually
committed in the way envisaged in the criminal code was not all that
mattered. What really mattered more was that it could, and in all certainty
would, have taken place, given the opportunity. Man does not matter by
himself either way, only as a part of a system. And the system as a whole is
a crime and a standing conspiracy. " A King cannot rule
innocently." Louis must die that the Republic should live. " Une
measure de salut public a prendre, un acte de providence rationale a exercer"
(Robespierre). As early as October, 1790, Robespierre was instrumental in
setting up a supreme court to deal with charges of lese-nation. The Tribunal
was to have the power to destroy all counter-revolutionary designs, and be
composed of " friends of the Revolution". Judges were to
Robespierre magistrates of the Government; in a free country, functionaries
elected by the people. Their domain and the basis of their judgment was not a
special science of jurisprudence, but the laws of the Constitution. "
Indeed, the word jurisprudence ought to be struck out of the French
vocabulary:- {ll a state possessing a constitution and a legislature the
courts need no jurisprudence but the text of the law." Thus the nation
as the source of all laws was to be the sole interpreter of the Constitution
and sole censor over the courts, and not some independent body. This line of
thought was to lead to the precedence given under the system of terror to
patriotic conscience and popular instinct over legal competence and legal
proof. Furthermore, in this whole approach there is already implied the
Terrorist concept of " suspect ", a person being considered guilty,
before having been convicted on any particular charge, simply because of
member ~ ship of a class of people, and because of past affiliations. On the
1 eve of his death on the guillotine one of the architects of Jacobinism, t
Desmoulins, was to discover the enormity of this conception of justice.
" It n'y a point de yens suspects, it n'y a que des prevenus de delits
fixes par la lot," he wrote Chapter Three VOLONTE UNE

(a) DIRECT DEMOCRATIC ACTION IT is not surprising that as a faithful
disciple of Rousseau Robespierre was not prepared to recognize the decision
of a representative assembly as expressing the kind of popular will which is
identical with the general will. Parliaments were in the same category as
other vested interests and corporations, although formally emanating from the
choice of the people., A representative assembly elected on the basis of a
property qualification, such as the Legislative ¿# ¿ Assembly, was certainly
not " of the people ". Without, as he stated, going the whole way
with Rousseau, nevertheless Robespierre could not reconcile himself to the
idea that an assembly, once elected, even if chosen on a free ballot, was
sovereign and its authority unquestionable. The absolute independence of a
parliamentary assembly was " representative despotism". There is
always the danger that the people might be afflicted with as many enemies as
it had deputies. Robespierre's motion of self-renunciation on the
ineligibility of members of the Constituent to the Legislative Assembly was
motivated by the fear that if the same people were elected, the Legislative
Assembly would become a permanent vested interest. Robespierre searched for
safeguards- against " representative despotism ". They were two:
constant popular control over the Legislative body, and direct democratic
action by the people. Robespierre dreamt of an assembly hall with a public
gallery large enough to contain twelve thousand spectators. Under the eyes of
so large a sample of the people, no deputy would dare to defend _anti-popular
interests. On the one hand, Robespierre insisted that any obstacles put in
the way of the people in a free choice of representatives were useless,
harmful and dangerous. On the other hand, he strongly approved of any rule
that was calculated to protect the people from the " misfortunes of a
bad choice ", and the corruption of its deputies. At one time
Robespierre demanded a fundamental law whereby at fixed and frequent
intervals the primary assemblies would be called upon to pass judgment upon
the conduct of their deputies. These assemblies were to have the power to
revoke their unfaithful representatives. Moreover, once in session, the
primary assemblies would act as the sovereign in council, and use the
opportunity to express their views on any matter concerning the public good.
No power could interfere with the exercise of direct popular sovereignty by
the nation in council. " Ce pen d'articles tres simplex, et pulses dans
les premiers principles de la Constitution suffiront pour l'a~ermir et pour
assurer a jamais le bonheur et la 1iberte du people francats. Robespierre
fdlminated particularly against an alliance between the Legislative and the
Executive, which to him could only mean a plot against the people. The
exercise of executive powers by an elected body was to Robespierre the worst
of all despotisms, an oligarchy. He dreaded most the modern system, where a
cabinet emanating from the majority of the assembly works in close touch
with, and is supported by, its own party. He was himself later in 1793 to
become the father of the theory of Revolutionary government exercised by the
Convention through committees, a system, as he put it, as new as the
Revolution itself, not to be found in any treatises on political science.
With an eye on the Rolandist Ministry, the Incorruptible condemned in
severest terms the state of affairs in which party leaders and members of the
cabinet manage everything behind the scenes in caucuses and ministerial
conclaves. Under such a system the will of the people becomes falsified, and
the majorities achieved by such machinations are illegitimate. The laws voted
upon in this way represent a fictitious, and not a genuine, expression of the
general will. The general will, constant and pure, the sole depository of
which is the people, must neither be arrogated by a party-cum-cabinet plot to
perpetuate " representative despotism ", nor become identified with
the selfish impulses of ephemeral assemblies. Robespierre expressed
impatience with the acceptance of numerical majority in the assembly as
sovereign. The general will, the will of the truly popular majority, is not
identified with I parliamentary majority or minority. The majority in the
real sense is where the true general will resides, even if that will happens
to be l expressed by a numerical minority. There was only one step from this
essentially anti-parliamentary proaramme to the justification of direct popular
action in the name of the sacred principle that the people have not only a
right, but the duty, to resist oppression and despotism, to rise actively
against the plots of government and I treacherous intrigues by unfaithful
representatives. " It is vital for Liberty to be free to exercise
reasonable censorship over the acts of the Legislative body. The National
Assembly itself is subject to the general will, and when it contradicts it
(the general will), the Assembly can no longer continue to exist.". The
mandatories of the people have to be placed in a position that would make it
impossible for them to harm liberty. As the people of Paris were nearest to
the seat of power, they and their representative bodies, the Commune and the
Sections, were duty bound to act as the watchdogs of the millions of people
in the provinces. This was Robespierre's attitude in the crisis of August
10th, 1792, as well as in the events which a year later caused the exclusion
of the Girondist deputies from the Convention, when the President of the
Convention, the Jacobin Herault de Sechelles, yielded to the armed insurgents
with the words that the force of the people was identical with the force of
reason. On May 26th, 1793, Robespierre said in his speech at the Jacobin Club
that " when the people is oppressed, and when it has nobody to rely upon
but itself, he would be a coward who would not call upon it to rise. When all
the laws are violated, when despotism has reached its climax, when good faith
and shame are trampled upon, then it is the duty of the people to rise. T hat
moment has arrived: our enemies are openly oppressing the patriots; they
wish, in the name of law, to plunge the people into misery and bondage.... I
know of only two modes of existence for the people: to govern itself, or to
entrust the task to mandatories." The popular deputies who wish for
responsible government are being oppressed. The people must come to the
Convention to protect them against the corrupt deputies. " I
declare," exclaims Robespierre, " that having received from the
people the mandate' to defend its rights, I regard as oppressor him who
interrupts me, or refuses me the right to speak, and I declare that alone I
put myself into a state of insurrection against the president and all the
members sitting in the Convention. Contempt having been shown for the
sans-culottes, I put myself into a state of insurrection against the corrupt
deputies." Three days later, again at the Jacobins, Robespierre went
further: " Si la commune de Paris, en particulier, a qui est confie
specialement le vein de defendre les interets de cette I grande cite, n'en
appelle point l'univers entier de la persecution dirigee contre la liberte
par les plus vils conspirateurs, si la commune de Paris ne s'unit au peuple,
ne forme pas avec lui une etroite alliance, elle viole le premier de ses
devoirs." An uprising of the people follows a pattern and has its
technique. Of the representative institutions of the people of Paris, the
Commune and the Sections, only the Commume was an elected and clearly defined
body. The Sections were the public meetings of the inhabitants of the various
districts. The direct democracy was a casually assembled body of men. The
Sections were assiduously attended and dominated by the Revolutionary activists
and enthusiasts, in fact by a small minority. At the moment of crisis a
Central Revolutionary Committee of the Sections is formed, usually
strengthened by provincial activists, federes who happen to be in Paris. The
members of this Insurrectionary Committee are in every case obscure, third-
and fourth-rate people. For it is supposed to be an uprising of the
anonymous, inarticulate masses. In the background are the Jacobin leaders to
direct, give inspiration and define the programme. The Central Insurrectionary
Committee of the people in insurrection create a Revolutionary Commune by
replacing the old one, or by declaring the existing body to have become
Revolutionary. Such a declaration marks, as said once before, the outbreak of
the uprising of the sovereign people against oppression. The people are now
to exercise directly their sovereign rights. The elected representatives of
the National Assembly must stand aside or yield to the will of the
represented. This is the pattern followed on August 10th, 1792, and May 31st
to June 2nd, 1793. On the earlier occasion Robespierre calls upon his Jacobin
friends to ', engage their sections to let the Assembly know the real will of
the people; and in order to discover that will, to maintain relations with
the popular societies", that is to say the clubs, where popular opinion
is formed. Robespierre repeats the same call on May 8th, 1793. His speeches
on the eve of the two insurrections constitute the political plank of the
insurgents, whether they refer to them or not. On August 15th, 1792,
Robespierre, who is not a member of the Assembly, heads the deputation of the
insurgent people to the Legislative Assembly to remind the representatives of
the people that the people is not " asleep ". The popular demands
in 1793 to expel the Girondist deputies, to limit the franchise to sans
culottes, to arm sans culotte Revolutionary armies everywhere to watch over l
the counter-revolutionaries, and to pay poor patriots for duties per formed
in the defense of liberty, come straight from Robespierre's | earlier
statements. On June 8th, 1793, when an attempt is made by Barere at the
Convention to cancel the emergency state of insurrection in Paris,
Robespierre insists that the insurrection must be made to spread to the whole
country, because the country could no longer suffer the " disorder that
had been reigning". The popular Revolutionary authorities, the Comite's
de surveillance and the Revolutionary armies must remain to maintain order,
safeguard I freedom and keep the aristocrats in check. | Robespierre did not
deny that such direct action by self-appointed guardians of the people's
freedom entailed anarchical violence. But the attitude of justice of the
peace did not befit the solemn nature of a Revolution and the supremacy of the
Revolutionary purpose. Revolutionary events have to be judged by the
Convention " en legislateurs du monde", declared Robespierre on
November 5th, 1792, in his speech against Louvet, who tried to indict him for
his part in the events of the last few months, and accused him of aspiring to
dictatorship. A Revolution cannot be accomplished without Revolutionary
violence. It was not possible " apres coup, marquer le point precis ou
doivent se briser les fiats de ['insurrection populaire ". If one
particular act of popular violence and coercion was to be condemned as
illegal, then all other Revolutionary events, the Revolution root and branch,
would have to be declared a crime. " Why do not you put on trial all at
the same time, the municipality, the electoral assemblies, the Paris
Sections, and all those who followed our example ? For all these things have
been illegal, as illegal as the Revolution, as unlawful as the destruction of
the throne and of the Bastille, as illegal as liberty itself." These were
unanswerable arguments, once the people was recognized as the supreme and
permanently active agent in politics. The " people " became here a
vague mystical idea. At one moment it appears as an avalanche forging ahead,
swallowing up all in its way, acting with monumental ruthlessness. At another
Robespierre presents it as modest, magnanimous and humane, the depository of
all virtues, schooled in the school of sorrow and humiliation. No knots of
power or nests of influence were to be left to hamper the march of the
people, or distort its self espression.

As late as spring, 1793, Saint-Just showed himself still obsessed I with
the sacredness of the principle of unlimited popular self expression and the
fear of governmental power appropriated by a small group of rulers. The
occasion on which; he- voiced these sentiments was the discussion on a draft
of Constitution submitted on behalf of the Girondists by Condorcet. The plan
contained two important features: a Legislative Assembly elected indirectly
by departmental councils, and an Executive Council on a direct popular vote
Both suggestions were rejected by Saint-Just in the name I oaths
indivisibility of the general will, the only guarantee of a I " vigorous
government " and a " strong constitution ", very characteristic
and strange epithets for a system under which the Executive was to have no
power at all. The Girondist project of an Executive Council elected directly
by the people appeared to Saint-Just the most dangerous threat of all to the
unity of the Republic and popular sovereignty. The Legislative and the
Executive would not only both be elected, and thus rivals, but the latter,
being derived from direct election, would be endowed with a higher prestige
than the indirectly chosen Assembly. Moreover, whereas in the past the
Ministers were outside the Executive Council, and did not form a cabinet
deliberating together and acting as a collectively responsible I body, the
new project laid down that the Executive Council and the I Ministers were to
form one and the same body. In short, the Council was to be an elected,
deliberating body, executing its own decisions. " Le conseil est le
ministre de ses propres volontes . . . sa vigilance sur lui-meme est
illusoire." Apart from the heresy of an elected Executive, the elected
Ministers enjoying also parliamentary privilege, the people would also be
without any guarantees against them. The Ministers would shield each other
through Ministerial solidarity, and the Legislature would remain without
powers, and indeed, without anything to do, since the Executive Council was
also to be a deliberative council. In two years, Saint-Just thought, the
Assembly would be suspended, and the Executive Council would reign supreme
and without restrictions of a fundamental law. The Council would have
enormous powers at its ' disposal. Its members would be the true
representatives of the people, the armies would be under its control, all
means of propaganda, intimidation and corruption in its hands. Only powerful
and famous men known to each other would be elected to form in due course a
hereditary body of patricians sharing between themselves the Executive power.
All hope for a people's government would have to be given up. There would
again be rulers and subjects. I Saint-Just's own plan envisaged an Assembly
elected by direct . suffrage, and an Executive Council chosen by secondary
electoral assemblies, and subordinated to the Assembly. The Executive Council
and the Ministers were to be forbidden to form one body, and furthermore the
Ministers, who were to be especially appointed, were to be forbidden to form
a cabinet, in case they should become a " cabal". Saint-Just went
so far as to forbid the Assembly to divide itself into committees, to appoint
special commissions from its own members, except to report on special
matters, or to carry out delegated functions. No way was to be opened for the
development of partial wills. The general will of the sovereign must not be
falsified by distilling or diluting processes. The general will is one and
indivisible. The Jacobin type of democratic perfectionism suet as was partly
embodied in the Constitution of 1793, especially in regard to plebiscitary
approval of laws voted by the Legislative and to the people's right to resist
oppression, was calculated to lead to anarchism: a direct democracy with
thousands of sections throughout France itI permanent session, bombarding the
National Assembly with resolutions, protests, petitions, and above all
deputations with the right to address the House; revoking and reselecting
deputies; a permanent national referendum broken up into small local
plebiscites; an Executive always suspect, and with no power to act; a
Legislative bullied and blackmailed by outside and frequently armed
interEcrence; finally, sporadic outbreaks of popular violence against eons
stitutional authorities; massacres such as the September massacres of the
suspects, with the people's instinct as the sole judge of their necessity and
timeliness, and the sole sanction to give them legality and justification.
This democratic perfectionism was in fact inverted totalitarianism. It was
the result not of a sincere wish to give every shade of opinion a chance to
assert itself, but the outcome of an expectation that the fruit of democratic
sovereignty stretched to its limit would be a single will. It was based on a
fanatical belief that there could be no noise than one legitimate popular
will. The other wills stood condemned a priori as partial, selfish and
illegitimate. The ancients have already understood, and indeed witnessed, the
phenomenon of . . . extreme democracy leading straight to personal tyranny.
Modern experience has added one link, the role of the totalitarian-democratic
vanguard in a plebiscitary regime, posing as the people. The fervour and
ceaseless activity of the believers, on the one hand, and intimidation
practiced on opponents and the lukewarm, on the other, are the instruments by
which the desired " general will " is made to appear as the will of
all. Only one voice is heard, and it is voiced I with such an insistence,
vehemence, self-righteous fervour and a tone of menace that all the other
voices are drowned, cowed and silenced. Robespierre was the chief engineer of
this type of popular self-expression in the elections to the Convention in
Paris during the undisputed dictatorship of the Insurrectionary Commune' with
" vote par appel nominal ", open voting, ban on opposition
journals, publication of names of people who had signed royalist petitions,
the scrutiny of electoral lists, and the exclusion of electors and 'elected
thoughr unorthodox. The result was that only a small -minority Qf the Paris
voters recorded their vote, in some sections lordly more than a twentieth of
the electorate. Only a tenth voted in the whole of France. The Jacobin
Constitution of 1793 was approved by barely two million votes out of the
seven entitled to vote. In Paris nobody voted against, in the departments
only fifteen to sixteen thousand. It was at once suspended and put into a
glass case in the hall of the Convention. Let the people speak, for their
voice is the voice of God, the voice of reason and of the general interest !
Robespierre clung with tenacity to his faith in the equation of liberty and
virtue, but even his faith had to give way to the painful realization that
this may not always be the case. He thus put up a ferocious and successful
fight against an appeal to the people on the fate of Louis XVI, demanding
first guarantees that " bad citizens, moderates, feuillants and
aristocrats would be given no access " to the primary assemblies and
would be prevented from misleading and playing upon the tender feelings of
the people. For the aim is not to let the people speak, but to insure that
they vote well, and bad voters are excluded. Saint-Just considered that an
appeal to the people on the fate of tile King would- be tantamount to a writ
for restoration of the 'Monarchy. Anti-parliamentarian under the Legislative
Assembly, Robespierre became in'tirne a staunch defender of the supremacy of
the Convention, especially after the expulsion of the Girondists. He opposed
bitterly the suggestion that the Convention should dissolve, after having
voted the Constitution of 1793, for the preparation of I which it had been
elected. The purified Convention (after the expulsion of the Girondists)
would be replaced by envoys of Pitt and Coburg, he claimed. At one time a
defender of the principle | that the Sections should remain in permanent
session, he later helped to reverse 1t.i The argument was that after the people
had won and ~ obtained their own revolutionary popular government, there
vitas I no need any more for direct democratic supervision and vigilance. I
The permanence of the Sections, which formerly secured such control, would
now be an opportunity for counter-revolutionary intriguers I and idlers to
corrupt public opinion and to plot against the Government, while the good
honest sans~ulottes were away in the fields and workshops. Robespierre came
to admit to himself that the people could not be trusted to voice its real
will. In his famous confidential Catechism Robespierre declared that the
gravest obstacle to Liberty and the greatest opportunity for the
counter-revolutionary forces was the people's lack of enlightenment. One of
the most important causes of the people's ignorance was the people's misery.
When will the people become enlightened? he asked himself When they have
bread and when the rich and the Government will have ceased to hire
perfidious journalists and venal speakers to mislead them. This line of
thought carries with it far-reaching implications, which were to be fully
grasped and systematized by Babeuf and the Egaux. What in effect Robespierre
was saying was that as long as the people were hungry, dominated and misled
by the rich, their recorded opinions could not be taken as reflecting the
true VAIi11 of the sovereign. ~ From the point of view of real democracy and
the true general will the task was therefore not just to let the people
speak, freely and spontaneously, and then to accept their verdict as final
and absolute. ~ It was first to create the conditions far a true expression
of the popular will. This involved the satisfaction of the people's material
needs, popular education, and above all the elimination of evil influences,
in other words, opposition. Only after that would the people be called to
vote. There could be no doubt about the way they would vote then. In the
meantime the will of the enlightened vanguard was the reef will of the'
people. There was thus no necessary inconsistency between the earlier
emphasis on the active and permanent exercise of popular sovereignty and the
later dictatorial policies of the enlightened vanguard - Robespierre and his
colleagues. The general will commanded different attitudes at different times.
It spoke every time through Robespierre. There was the need to mobilize and
to stir the masses in order to enable the Revolutionary vanguard to carry out
the real will of the people. Once the vanguard had come into power, it must
be given freedom to realize that will in all its purity. The a priori consent
of the masses to what the vanguard would do may be taken for granted, and if
so,, the perpetuation of popular political activity, unnecessary in the new
conditions, would only, as said before in another context, give a chance to
counter-revolutionary cunning.

(b)LIBERTY AS AN OBJECTIVE PURPOSE The nearer the Jacobins were to power,
the stronger grew their insistence on the conception of liberty as a set of
values and not as merely the absence of constraint. The general will acquired
an objective quality, and the reference to the actual exercise of popular
sovereignty as the essential mode of arriving at the general will came to be
less often repeated. It is only fair to the Jacobins to emphasize in this
connection the supreme crisis of the Revolution, which they were called upon
to face in 1793. The country was in deadly peril from invasion. The
federalist uprisings in Lyons, Bordeaux, Toulon, Marseilles, Normandy and
elsewhere, the success of the Vendeean revolt, the breakdown of the
circulation of commodities, the inflation caused by the collapse of the
assignats, the paper money, combined to create an atmosphere of fanaticism,
fear, excitement, suspicion and general emergency. Yet, these factors, grave
no doubt as they were, could not in themselves account for the regime of
terror, without the permanent totalitarian disposition of Jacobinism. Without
the fanatical, single-minded faith in their embodying the sole truth, the
Jacobins could not have found the courage and strength to build up and
sustain their regime of terror. Without their ever more narrowly defined
orthodoxy, there would have been no need to brauld so many as, and indeed to
turn so many into, enemies of the Revolution. The Terror continued unabated
even after the decisive victories of the Revolution over all its enemies,
external and internal, n October, 1793. It fell to Saintlust, as rapporteur
on the most important issues of the Revolution in the years 1793-4, to start
the ! process of redefining the Revolutionary idea of liberty. His first
major pronouncement on this matter was the famous speech on supplies,
November 23rd, 1792. The alarming state of French finances and economy in
general I was attributed by Saint Just to the " essor " of liberty
that followed the outbreak of the Revolution, and to " la difficulte de-
retablie I l'economie au milieu de la vigueur et de l'independance de
['esprit public. L'independance armee contre l'independance n'a plus de loi,
plus de juge . . . toutes les volontes isolees r''en obligent aucune."
Liberty was at war with morality arid order. There was a danger of anarchy.
To counteract this anarchy of isolated wills, Saintlust at first resorted to
grand invocations of national solidarity and to the argument that the
interests of everyone had become so intertwined with the fortunes of the
Revolution that its collapse would spell tuliversal doom. " I1 faut que
tout le monde oublie son interest et son orgueil. Le bonheur et l'interet
particular vent une violence a l'ordre social, quand ils ne vent point une
portion de l'interet et du bonheur public. Oubliez-vous vous-memes. La
revolution fran,caise est placee entre un arc de triomphe et un ecueil qui'
nous briserait tous. Votre interet vous commande de ne point vous
diviser." Whatever the differences of opinion among the patriots, the
tyrants would not take any notice of them. " We win together or perish
together." The self-interest of everyone commands him to forget his
personal good. Personal salvation is only possible through general salvation.
All personal interest and welfare must be sunk in the general pool. ~ From
this appeal to the enlightened self-interest of everyone, Saint-Just comes to
the idea of a Republic that represents objective values of its own, and in
such an integrated form as to prevent the independence of wills. The Republic
envisaged by him would " embrace all relations, all interests, all
rights, all duties " and would assure an " allure commtme " to
all parts of the State. Liberty, the opposite of independence, becomes now
" l'obeissance de chacun a l'harmonie individuelle et homogene du corps
entier". This con-' ception is translated into a " Republique une
et indivisible . . ,1 avec l'entiere abstraction de tout lieu et toutes
personnel ". The unity and indivisibility of the Republic is thus
transformed into something that is prior even to the Social Contract. It Is
an essential part of the objective general will and liberty, out of the reach
of the transient will of passing mortals. The whole comes before its
components. . " A Republic, one and indivisible, is in the very nature
of liberty; it would not last more than a moment, if it was based upon a
fragile convention between men." This was another reason for
Saint-Just's vehement opposition to Colldorcet's draft of the 1793
Constitution. The Girondist project envisaged a Legislative elected
indirectly by departmental councils, Id not by the " concours simultane
de la volonte generate " and ~le peuple en corps ". A deputy
elected that way, Saintlust maint~ined, would represent orily the portion of
the people who voted for hirn, sandlot the indivisible nation. All the
deputies coming together as representatives of the fractions of the people
would not constitute a legitimate majority; they would not express or embody
the general will, but would form a congress, instead of a National Assembly.
The majority in a congress derives its authority from I the voluntary
adhesion of the parties. The sovereign thus ceases to exist, as it is divided.
A general will obtained that way is a " speculative", not a real
will. Those who will must do so primarily as aspects of an indivisible
entity, and not as possessors of partial wills. The nation is an organic,
indivisible entity, and not a conglomeration of mechanically joined
particles. If each department was understood to represent a portion of the
territory, with the portion of the people inhabiting it in possession of
sovereignty over that province, the " droit de cite du people en
corps" would become undermined and the Republic would be broken up by
the slightest shock, such as the Vendeean rebellion. The territorial division
was solely a geometrical division for electoral purposes, not even for
administrative reasons. The a priori unity of Frenchmen was the basis and
symbol of the unity of the Republic, not the territory, and certainly not the
Government, because this would mean a Monarchy. Praising Saint-Just's views,
one of the deputies remarked that his draft of the Constitution would make it
possible for Frenchmen to settle down as a French nation, and to observe
their obligations to one another, even if they were evacuated to a foreign
territory. The instinct for national unity emerged stronger than the logic of
the Social Contract. If the essence of a nation is what Renan was to call
some eighty years later " le plebiscite de tons les jours ", in
Luther words the active and constantly reaffirmed will to live together and
under the same law, then the right of secession could not be withheld. The
Jacobins preached the former, but passionately denied the latter. ;? They had
to postulate an a priori will to form an indivisible entity, as they were too
cosmopolitan and rationalist in I their outlook to admit a historic, racial
or any other irrational basis for national unity. This conception of French
national unity, when confronted with I l the Revolutionary attitude to old
Europe, was calculated to involve France in one of those permanent wars which
spring from a | conflict of irreconcilable ideas on relations between
nations. Such a war is usually the outcome of the attitude of " heads I
win, tails you lose " adopted by a Revolutionary power preaching a new
doctrine of international relations, not based on reciprocity. On the basis
of the voluntary, non-racial and unhistorical conception of nationhood
Revolutionary France, rationalizing her interests and her desire for
expansion, claimed-true, not without some hesitation-to have the right to
admit into the Republic foreign provinces on her borders, like Savoy, Nice,
the cities on the Rhine, Belgium and others, which had expressed freely or
had been brought to voice, the wish to be united to the French Republic.
Coupled with the French proclamations of November Igth and December I5th,
1792, that France would hasten to help any people rising against its King and
feudal system, this attitude amounted to an invitation to any foreign commune
or province to break away from the body of the nation, the State entity. A
partial will was thus set up against the general will of the whole. France
was to become the cause and engineer of the disintegration of nations and
annexed of their severed parts, in the name of the right of any group to
express and act on its general will. At the same time the Convention declared
the death penalty for any attempt to divide French territory or to Cedric any
part of the " Republique une et indivisible ". The implication was
that in Republican and democratic France a general national will had already
crystallized, while no such will could have crystallized in the countries
under the feudal system. Furthermore, as Europe was in any case heading
towards a unified free form of government, the beginning might as well be
made by joining the liberated parts of Europe to France. It would thus be
possible to give them protection, while offering to France, the champion of
the unity of free peoples against the dynastic tyrannies which have kept the
European peoples divided, an increase of strength in the struggle for
universal liberation. This meant endless war with old Europe, without
prospect of an agreement on any common basis. No halt was in sight. For it
must have soon appeared clear to the I more acute Revolutionaries-among them
indeed Robespierre- that in fact the free will of men, instead of being a
tangible and reliable criterion for nationhood, was in fact very shifting
ground. Hence the idea of natural frontiers. Although no doubt part of French
tradition. and an expression of a rationalized desire for expanded and safer
frontiers, the idea of natural frontiers was meant also to be a safety valve,
a signpost to the French themselves, and a kind of assurance to the nations
of old Europe that there was a halt to the French claims to the right of
annexing peoples who had offered themselves for reunion. France would not go
on annexing parts of other states for ever, for she had come to believe in
the c.~stence of a national entity, which must not be broken by the partial
will of parts. The basis of this national entity was no more l ~ the will of
the passing generation, but something of a more permanent character-the facts
of nature and history, which together have fixed unmistakable frontiers to
nations in the form of rivers, mountains and seas. The concomitant of this
recognition of a natural and historical basis of national unity was the
declaration of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states, the
spread of anti-alien feeling and the campaign against foreign agents and
spies L in France-as a reaction to earlier proselytism.

(C) THE RIGHT OF OPPOSITION; OUTLAWING OF PARTIES ., The a priori idea of
national unity, however, far from serving as a basis for a national
reconciliation founded on a common past, gave rise to a process of
eliminating from the national body the elements thought to be inassimilable
to the new principle of French national existence. Saint-Just's "
Rapport sur la necessite de declarer le gouvernement revolutionnaire jusqu'a
la paix ", made on October Ioth, 1793, seas a turning point in this
respect. . It is a far cry from that conception of liberty which takes for
granted the right of every individual to express his particular will, |.nd to
defend his particular interest spontaneously and without external constraint.
It is very remote from the confident belief that if everyone forms his will
on his interest, the general will would result from a majority of wills. A
new principle which " hence forth should never depart from the minds of
those who govern" is declared: the Republic " will never be founded
till the will o] the sovereign has constrained the royalist minority and
ruled ove' it by right of conquest". 矰epuis que le people
fran,cais a manifesto sa volonte tout ce qui est hors le souverain est
ennemi." There was nothing~between the people and its enemies but the
sword. Those who Could not be governed by justice, must be ruled by the
sword. " Vous ne parlerez point la.meme langue, vous ne vous
entendrez.3amais. Chassez-les done ! " And he meant it literally, for
the plan proposed by him a little later envisaged the eventual expulsion of
all suspects, as well as their total expropriation,~ in other words the total
liquidation of a class. Saint-Just invokes the principles of democracy in
this connection. " Il leur faut la puissance, qui n'appartient ici qu'a
la d¿C ¿mocratie." The idea of democracy implied here contains no
reference to the right of opposition, to individual liberties or toleration,
and clearly revives the ancient Greek view of democracy as the victory of the
mass of the underprivileged over the privileged minority, and the suppression
of the latter by the former. Severity is an essential element of a free
democratic regime, and plays a greater part there than in a tyrannical state.
" There is no government which can preserve the rights of citizens
without a policy of severity, but the difference between a free system and a
tyrannical regime is that in the former that policy is employed against the
minority opposed to the general good, and against the abuses or the
negligence of the authorities, while in the latter the severity of the State
power is directed against the unfortunates delivered to the injustice and the
impunity of the powers." A weak government was ultimately oppressive to
the people Saint-Just thought. " It is just that the people should in
its turn rule over its oppressors", for " tyrants must be oppressed".
All the wisdom of a government consisted in the elimination of the party
opposed to the Revolution and in making the people happy at the expense of
the vices of the enemies of liberty. The surest means of establishing the
Revolution was to turn it to the benefit of those who support it, and to the
destruction of those who fight it. Robespierre said the same things, and
almost in the same words. There were no divergencies between the
Incorruptible and Saint-Just, after they were brought together by the
latter's election to the Convention. " There are no other citizens in a
Republic "Capote Robespierre, `` than republicans. Royalists . .- .
conspirators arena nothing but aliens, or rather enemies.'' Social protection
was the duel of the citizen. But a citizen was not just everyone born G,11
French soil. Only he was a citizen who was spiritually identified with the
substance that constituted French nationhood, the general: N;ill`-' The
enemies of the people could not possibly be offered an opportunity of
distorting and sabotaging the people's will. Neither the necessity of
national unity, which commands men to sink their differences in the face of
external danger, nor the idea of the legitimacy of the natural divergencies
of opinion had any validity. There were only the people, and the people's
enemies. k Domptez par la terreur Ies enemies de la liberte . . . vous aver
raison comme fondateurs d' une republique. Le go uvernement de !a Revolution
est le despotisme de la liberte contre la tyrannic." Both tyranny and
liberty employ the sword, but the only resemblance between them is that the
blade in either hand shines similarly. What about the right of opposition ?
Nothing was more calculated to exasperate Saint-Just and Robespierre than
this argument, the claim of an opponent to a right to oppose the regime as a
right to resist oppression. Resistance to oppression was a sacred right and
duty in a tyrannical state, but once the regime of liberty had been
established, once the people had come into their own, the claim to resist
" oppression" by the new order was mockery or perversity, or sheer
selfishness, defiant of the general good. " Let the people claim its
liberty, when it is oppressed, but when liberty is triumphant, and when
tyranny has expired, that one Could forget the general good in order to kill
his country by preference of one's personal good, this is mean villainy,
punishable hypocrisy !" The claim of the aristocracy that its
destruction by the people was an act of dictatorship was a revolting abuse of
terminology. The people and tyranny !-it was a contradiction in terms. "
The people is no tyrant, and it is the people that now reign." "
Toutes, les idees se confondent ": a " fripon " condemned to
the guillotine invokes the right of resistance to oppression ! Robespierre
fulminated against justice of the people being called 'barbarism or
oppression. " Indulgence pour les royalistes ! . . . grace pour
scelerats.... Non ! grace pour ['innocence, grace pour les faibles, grace
pour les malheureux, . . . grace pour lthumanite !" It is absurd to say
that a free government of the people can be suppressive- because it is
vigorous. " On se trompe. La question 'eat mal posee.'- Such a
government oppressed only what was evil, and was therefore just. A Republican
government rested o the principle offs' vertu ', or terror. It was true that
force made no right, but-it may well be that it was indispensable for making
justice and reason respected. Not only traitors, but also the indifferent,
the passive, who were doing nothing for the Republic, must be punished. The
people's cause must be supported as a whole, for those who pick holes are
disguised traitors. " Un patriote soutient la Republique en masse, celui
qui la combat en detail est un traltre.... Tout ce qui n'est pas respect du
people et vous (Convention) est un crime." As the aim of an anti-federal
government of the people was the unity of the Republic not for the profit of
those in power, but for the benefit of the people as a whole, no isolationist
tendency could be tolerated in an individual. Such isolationism would be as
immoral in the civil sphere as federalism was in the political sphere. "
Lorsque la liberte est fondee, il s'agit de ['observation des devoirs envers
la patrie, il s'agit d'etre citoyen." There could be no reason and no
excuse-as there was in the past-for isolating oneself in order to preserve
one's independence. Saint1ust insists more than once the only difference
between liberty and independence to do evil. For liberty was in the last
analysis not freedom from constraint, but a set of objective and exclusive
values. Independence from these values implied vice and tyranny, bondage to
egoism, passion and avarice. " L'idee particuliere que chacun se fait de
sa liberte, scion son interet, produit l'esclavage de tons." According to
Robespierre it was wrong to regard terror as pale repressive violence,
resorted to without reference to the general principles governing a Republic.
It was only accentuated justice- nothing but an emanation from and special
facet of the principle of virtue-not a special principle. ~ " La terreur
n'est autre chose que la justice prompte, severe' inflexible; elle est done
une emanation de la vertu; elle est moins un principe particulier qu'une
consequence du principe general de la democratic applique aux plus pressants
besoins de la patrie." Similarly Saint-Just declared that a Republican
government had vertu as its principle; if not terror. " Que venlent ceux
qui ne veulent ni vertu ni terreur ? " Elsewhere he said that a
Revolution needed a dictator to save it by force, or censors to save it by
virtue. Virtue, the elusive personal quality, the least tangible of all
criteria, was fast becoming the decisive criterion, when the new splits were
no longer caused by class differences or royalist loyalties. The doomed
wicked were to Robespierre the assassins from within, in the first place, the
mercenary scribes (journalists) allied to kill public virtue, to sow discord
and to prepare a political counterrevolution by means of a "
contra-revolution morale ". Journalists could expect no quarter from the
former defender of unrestricted liberty of the press. The idea of a sole
exclusive truth, which is the basis of the rigid and fixed conception of
Republican virtue, excludes the possibility of political parties representing
honest differences of opinion. According to Saint Just it was precisely in a
regime of Liberty -such as he claimed to be representing-and one based on
absolute truth and virtue, that parties and factions were an anachronism, and
a criminal one. Factions had a useful function in the " ancient regime
", they contributed to the isolation of despotism and weakened the
irt'duence of tyranny. " They are a crime to-day, because they isolate
liberty." Liberty is attained only when the general will can express
itself as an entity, as the sole and undivided sovereign deliberating on the
common good of the people as a whole. The curiosity awakened by party
controversy, the corruption engendered by party strife, distracted the hearts
and minds from the love of country and single-minded devotion to its
interests. " Every party is therefore criminal, because it makes for the
isolation of the people and the popular societies, and for the independence
of the government. Any faction is therefore criminal, because it neutralizes
the power of public ~vittue.... The solidity of our Republic is in the very
nature of things. The sovereignty of the people requires that it should be
one . . . it is opposed to factions -Every faction is therefore an attempt on
sovereignty." Saint-Just is quite unable to see in the parties an
instrument for expressing and organizing the various trends in public opinion
He only sees the people, on the one hand, and the parties conspiring against
it, on the other. He called upon the people and the Convention to govern
firmly and to impose their will upon the " criminal factions ". The
description of the evils of a multiple party system is strikingly reminiscent
of the evils now adays att bused to a single party regime. It deserves to be quoted
in full " Pride engenders the factions. The factions are the most
terrible poison of the body politic, they put the life of the citizens in
peril by their power of calumny; when they reign in a State, no person is
certain of his future, and the empire which they torment is a coffin; they
put into doubt falsehood and truth, vice and virtue, justice and injustice;
it is force that makes law.... In dividing the people the factions put party
fury in place of liberty; the sword of the law and the assassins' daggers clash
together; no. one dares to speak or to be silent; the audacious individuals,
who get to the top in the parties, force the citizens to choose between crime
and crime." -: As to himself and his friends, Saint-Just would reject
witl; indignation any imputation that they, too, were a party. They were the
very people itself This he declared in his last and undelivered speech in
defense of Robespierre. He looked forward in that speech to the day when the
Republican Institutions would eliminate for ever all parties, putting "
human pride under the yoke of public liberty ", and the "
dictatorship of justice ". He prayed fervently that " the factions
may disappear so that liberty alone would remain ". " The fondest
prayer a good citizen can pray for his country, the greatest benefaction a
generous nation may derive from its virtue, is the ruin, is the fall of the
factions." For after the struggle for unfettered sovereignty of the
people had been won, the supreme aim was the unity of will. " 11 faut une
volonte une," wrote Robespierre in his carpet. " That it should be
republican we want republican ministers, republican papers, republican
deputies, a republican government." The external war was a mortal
malady, but the body politic was ill from revolution and the " division
of wills ". Like to Rousseau, a political party was to Robespierre the
function of a private interest. ' The factions are the coalition of private
interests against the general good." -For there is such a definite
quantity as the general good: "The concert of the friends of liberty,
the complaints of the oppressed, the natural ascendancy of reason, the force
of public opinion do not constitute a faction." Incapable of adapting
himself to the idea that differences of opinion were a normal phenomenon and
not unnatural, an expression of egoism, perversion, or stupidity, Robespierre
was quite shaken at the moment of his greatest triumph, when after the fall
of the " factions ", the Girondists, the Hebertists and the
Dantonists, he was faced with new strains and new differences. He was
appalled at the idea that there should still be differences, and divisions of
opinion. He declared that wherever a line of demarcation made itself visible,
wherever a division pronounced itself, " la il y a quelque chose qui
tient au salut de la patrie ". It was not natural that Were should be
separation and division among people equally animated | 9'y-the love for the
public good. " It n'est pas naturel qu'il s'eleve I une sorte de
coalition contre le gouvernement qui se devoue pour le sahlt de la
patrie." It was to him a symptom of a new malady, because the Convention
had of late been voting decrees on the spot. It Lad been showing unanimity on
the sacred principles. There were no more factions. The Convention, with a
trained discerning eye, had been going straight ahead and hitting its target
unerringly. The postulate of unanimity as the only natural principle among
patriots implied the postulate of unity in action. The question presented
itself: how would democracy work, without parties ? There is no direct answer
to this from Saint-Just, but what he had to say on the subject of educating
public opinion and organizing the sovereignty of the people clearly re-echoes
Rousseauist formuLe and deserves to be quoted in full. It was doubtless the
vision of a plebiscitary democracy (or dictatorship), where the people are
asked to answer with a clear " yes " or " no " obvious
questions, the answer to which could hardly be in doubt. " As all are
incessantly deliberating in a free state, and public opinion is affected by
many vicissitudes and stirred by caprices and various passions, the
legislators must take care that the question of the general good is always
clearly put, so that when deliberating all should be able to think, act and
speak in the spirit and within the framework of the established order . . .
in harmony. It is in this way that the Republic truly becomes one and
indivisible, and the sovereign is composed of all hearts carried forward to
virtue." Unless the question was put and answered in this circular |
way, society would be delivered to strife, selfishness and anarchy. Another
indication about Saint Just箂 ideas on the subject may be gained from
his complaint that the laws and decrees passed by the Convention had been deteriorating
as their projects had ceased to be the subject of preliminary examination and
discussion at the Jacobin Club. Clearly Saintlust thought it inadvisable to
have the Convention without guidance from an extra-parliamentary body of
censors.

(d) THE THEORY OF REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT Robespierre's answer to the
problem is contained in his theory of the Revolutionary Government, and has
the merit of precision "J'avoue que mes notions en politique no
ressemblent en rien a celles de beaucoup d'hommes," he said about his
theory. He said, as we have seen, that it was new as the Revolution itself,
and could not be found in any of the theoretical treatises. It was the
product of the Revolution, shaped on its lessons, and a theory that reversed
whatever was left of Robespierre's earlier ideas on the separation of powers
and his enmity towards the Executive. The function of a government was
according to Robespierre to direct the physical and moral forces of the
nation towards the purpose for which it was instituted. Thus while the aim of
a constitutional regime was to preserve the Republic, that of a Revolutionary
Government was to found it. A constitutional regime can be established only
in conditions of victorious and peaceful liberty. A Revolutionar; ! Government
implies the war of liberty against its enemies. Old defends civil liberty,
the other public liberty. A constitution Government has as its task the
defense of personal freedom agairus~ the encroachments of governmental
powers; a Revolutionary regime must defend public liberty, embodied in the
Revolutionary Government, the actions. It owes protection to peace of
citizens, nothing but death to enemies of public liberty. " Cell; qui
les (Revolutionary violent measures) nomment arbitraires ou tyranniques vent
de stupides sophistes on pervers qui cherchent i confondre les
contraires." The Revolutionary Government me<! have the powers and
the machinery to act with rep city, urea cambered by any-Gad checks and legal
niceties, to mobilize a) forces of the nation, and to hit ruthlessly and
powerfully.

VOLONTE UNE I9 means that the barrier between the Legislature and the
Executive must be broken down so as to insure prompt action. Government
action must no longer be slow and complicated as it was in the past, when
nothing but informal and casual contact was maintained between the two
branches of the administration. Robespierre had moved very far from his
savage denunciation of the " intrigues " between the Rolandist
Ministry and the Girondist leaders in the Assembly, and from the principle
that no deputy could be a Minister L of State. What Robespierre was proposing
was government by I a Committee emanating from the Convention. All executive
powers, rendered practically unlimited Owing to the Revolutionary character
of the Government' were to be handed over to a " faithful commission
", " d'un . . . patriotisme epure, une commission si sure que lton
ne poisse plus cacher ni le nom des trustees ni la frame des trahisons."
It was to be a Committee of the most faithful and most ruthless. This was the
conception underlying the regime of the Committee of Public Safety and
Jacobin dictatorship, a regime designed to make the Revolutionary purpose
triumph at all costs, and not to realize liberty in the sense of free self-expression;
a system which replaced the principle of popular choice by the principle of
the infallibility of the enlightened few in the central body acting in a
dictatorial manner through special agents appointed by themselves. " The
two opposite genii . . . contesting the empire of nature, are in this great
period of human history interlocked in a mortal combat to determine
irretrievably the destinies of the world, and France is the stage of this
redoubtable struggle. Without, all tyrants are bent upon encircling you;
within, all the friends of tyranny are banded in a conspiracy: they will go
on plotting, until _all hope will have been wrested from crime. We have to
strangle internal as well as the external enemies of the Republic, or perish
with her; and, in a situation like this, your first maxim of policy must be
the guiding principle that the people shall be led by reason, but the enemies
of the people by terror "-thus spoke Robespierre. War ! The state of war
! This means a state of emergency, above all an atmosphere of " rise and
kill him, or he still kill you". If you credit your opponent with such a
fixed resolution, you are free of all obligations towards him, legal, moral
or other. Doing justice, observing the code of law, become L meaningless;
sheer mockery, when demanded. The supreme law is salvation achieved by the
annihilation of the enemy. The war is global; global, for the theatre of
operations is global; global, because all lives, all possessions and all
values are involved, all assets and all means mobilized. This being so, the
war has no fixed or limited front. It is not the battlefield alone where the
fight takes place. Every preventive action taken to weaken the enemy, to sow
confusion in his ranks, to impoverish him or to undermine his morale, to
uncover his flank or to deceive and to get him into a trap, is legitimate, is
a laudable act; indeed, a sacred duty. From the point of view of those
engaged in the battle on your own side, the fact of war changes the whole
scale of values. A war entails direction of the war-operations by a supreme
command acting in strictest secrecy, with all possible speed, employing every
means of surprise, not hampered by any checks or control; furthermore, by a
supreme command composed of men especially, or rather exceptionally,
qualified for the task: endowed with the gift of leadership, trustworthy,
ruthless, energetic and pure. In short, all emphasis comes to be placed on
personal qualities, Robespierre elusive quality of virtue. The democratic
test of election, of preliminary, reiterated and confirmed authorization for
the democratic execution by appointed, supervised and responsible leaders of
decisions publicly debated, clearly defined and resolved upon, relegated into
the background. It is impossible to debate in public' or to prescribe how to
act in the heat of battle, under the impact of unforeseen mortal
contingencies. The men in the supreme command will know best how to act.
Authorization to and control of leaders must make place for implicit trust, a
priori consent, unconditional obedience. The relationship between the leaders
aM the led assumes the character of a personal relationship. However much a
salvationist creed may try to ignore the personal element in the realm of
pure theory, in so much as in course of time it evolves into a war of the
elect against the condemned, it must resort to the personal leader-saviour,
endowed with unique qualities, eliciting filial love and obedience from the
led. The latter are soldiers in a global struggle. Soldiers do not argue, but
carry out orders. Sometimes these orders seem contradictory, often
outrageous, but the soldier must assume that however inexplicable and wrong
they may appear in the narrow context surveyable by him, they form part of
the grand strategy of the global war, and thus are perfectly logical and
desirable moves, when viewed from the point of view of the whole. And so the
suspension of personal judgment is a categorical imperative, and the very
opposite of characterlessness and moral nihilism. The personal element
becomes all-important for another reason. If the power of the supreme command
must be so boundless, its action so rapid and ruthless, placed in wrong hands
it will surely become the most terrible power for evil, in proportion to the
means at its disposal. " Plus son pouvoir est grand, plus son action est
libre et rapide; plus il doit etre dirige par la bonne foi. Le jour ou il
tombera dans des mains impures ou perfides, la liberte sera I perdue; son nom
deviendra le pretexte et ['excuse de la contrerevolution meme. Son energie
sera celle d'un poison violent." Hence the supreme and sacred duty of
watching over the men holding the rudder, of purging the supreme command all
the time from the contaminated ~or contaminable. Who will perform the task ?
Certainly not the ordinary soldiers. The result would be anarchy. They have
not in any case the means of knowing what is going on in the headquarters. It
must be the purest of the ensemble at the supreme command, in fact the
strongest. This is the reason for Robespierre's maniacal insistence on the
personal purity of the leaders of the Revolution, of his obsessive campaign
against the " corrupt ". These were in in-is eyes more dangerous
than the open counter-revolutionaries, because they could as it were by one
move turn the Revolution into counter-revolution. Impure, corrupt, was, of
course, considering Robespierre's mentality, any one who opposed him or
differed from him, or showed an open mind and receptive spirit to things
outside the orbit of ascetic Jacobin virtue. Nearly everyone felt in peril
when listening to Robespierre's denunciation of the unnamed impure in the
Convention and on the two supreme Committees who must be weeded out, and to
Robespierre's " woe, woe to him ~o names himself ". In the
circumstances of war, in face of the - afi~iost cosmic stakes, and the
titantic powers at hand, the sole means of purging an impure was of course
killing him, just as the sole defense by the impure was to kill the accuser.
" I1 faut guillotiner, ou s'attendre a l'etre "-as the shrewd and
adroit Barras put it. A brief outline of the regime of the Committee of
Public Safety will bring home the antithesis reached by the Jacobin idea in
the course of the Revolution.

The Jacobin dictatorship was an improvisation. It came into existence by
stages, and not in accordance with a blue-print. At the same time, it
corresponded to, and was the consequence of, a fixed attitude of mind of its
authors, intensified and rendered extreme by events. The Comite de defense (generate)
set up on January 1st, 1793, was the immediate parent of the Committee of
Public Safety. It was made to sit en permanence on March 25th Reorganized and
strengthened, it entered on April 6th upon its unbroken and undisputed reign
as the Committee of Public Safety. Its duties were to supervise and
accelerate the work of the Provisional Executive Council, and it had powers
to suspend the orders of the Council and to take any steps it considered
necessary for the defense and safety of the country, and to have them
executed forthwith by the Council. Although it emanated from the Convention,
was responsible to it and was appointed originally only for executive duties,
the Committee of Public Safety soon acquired an absolute ascendancy over the
Convention, deprived the Executive Council of all powers, and in fact as well
as, in the Course of time, ~ law brushed aside all institutions of elected
democracy. On October 10Th, I7g3, the Executive Council, Ministers,
commanding generals and -all constituted authorities were placed under its
supervision. The Representatives on Mission, with practically unlimited
powers and subordinated directly to the Committee, were the arms of the
latter in the provinces. The decrees of April 8th and 30th, 1793, gave them
powers to supervise " most actively " the agents of the Executive
Council, the armies, army supplies, to prevent sabotage and the squandering
of public money, to fight defeatism and attempts on morale, and to keep up
the Republican spirit in the army and in the rear. On a motion of
Billaud-Varenne on November I8th, 1793 (28 Brumaire), they were granted
powers to supervise and overrule local authorities, and to prosecute local
officials for defaults, and to replace them without elections, it being
implied that the local Jacobin Club would be consulted. Following Danton's
intervention of a few days earlier, the Convention on December 4th (I4
Frimaire) appointed national agents to the smaller administrative units with
similar overall powers as those held by the Representatives, held directly
from the Committee of Public Safety. These agents were to replace the elected
procureurs- syndics of districts and procureurs de Commune, and their
substitutes. They were vested with powers of enforcing laws, of tracking down
sabotage and incompetence, of purging the local administration and the local
Comites de surveillance whose task was to watch over aliens and suspects. The
national agents as " agents of the whole people " were to replace
local representatives brought to power by " the influence of family
fortune" and family ties. A decree of 5 Brumaire suspended election of
municipal bodies altogether. This extreme form of centralization based upon
the contrast between the oneness of the national interest and the singleness
of the general will, on the one hand, and the partial character of the
regional units, on the other, reached thus its climax in a centralized
dictatorship of a small body, simultaneously a part of the Legislative and an
Executive. " Le depot de Execution des lois est enfin confide a des
depositaires responsables" was Danton's comment. This dictatorship was a
single party dictatorship. Its laws and decrees clearly envisaged the closest
co-operation between the agents of the dictatorial Committee and the local
popular societies, that is to say, the Jacobins, a network of societies, with
no place in the Constitution or in the official framework of administrative
institutions. At the same time all public meetings other than of Jacobin
clubs were forbidden as subversive of the unity of the government and tending
to federalism. All Revolutionary armies, which had been raised locally *om
among the zealots and maintained at the expense of the rich to watch over
counter-revolutionaries and to combat federal uprisings, were dissolved, to
leave only the Revolutionary army of the Convention common to the whole of
the Republic. On April 1st, 1794 (I2 Germinal), Carnot moved that a vast
country like France could not be governed by a government which was not in
the closest and permanent touch with the various parts-" ramasse et
dirige ses forces vers un but determine ". The Committee of Public
Safetv should therefore be the organ which does all the thinking, proposes
all major measures _ to the Convention, and acts on its own in urgent and
secret matters; , a plan that would seem unexceptional to-day to people
accustomed ~ to centralized cabinet government, but extraordinary at the-im~
r it we as expounded. On April 2nd the Provisional Executive 1 Council was
abolished. The Committee of Public Safety remained the supreme and sole
executive body with twelve especially appointed commissions under it. The
sample of the sovereign people, Paris, was destined to lose the special
position for which the Jacobins had fought so hard against the G*ondists, in
the advance towards extreme centralization. The law of I4 Frimaire forbade
the formation of any central committee of the Sections. All the insurrections
and journe'es of the earlier days were hatched in and carried out by the ad
hoc organized central Committees. To deal a blow against the Hebertists, who
were the masters of the Commune, the Sections were forbidden to correspond
with the Commune, and were instructed to maintain direct contact with the
Committee of General Security, the auxiliary body of the Committee of Public
Safety. Only three months earlier (September sth) the Sectional assemblies
had been renovated and given powers to arrest suspects. The same law had
fixed two Section meetings per week-which was already a restriction of the
principle of permanence-and a salary of forty sons for every attendance so as
to attract and enable the right type of sans-culottes to be there. Hebert and
his friends paid with their lives for the last attempt at a popular
insurrection made before 9 Thermidor against the Convention and the Committee
of Public Safety, after the Hebertists had been denounced by Robespierre for
their violent actions against religious worship. Hand in hand with
centralization went the organization of terror. The vital decrees were passed
in the later part of March and early in April, 1793, and were largely due to
Robespierre and Marat, the latter having consistently agitated for personal
dictatorship " to save liberty by violence ". Whole groups of
people were outlawed. People who took part in counter-revolutionary riots and
persons seen with a white ribbon or other royalist and rebellious insignia
were deprived of such legal safeguards as criminal procedure and jury; if
apprehended and found guilty, they were to be execute! within twe~r-h`~
Emigres were outlawed, banished for ever, and their goods confiscated, and
enemies of the Revolution and aristocrats were put " hors de lot".
The law on the " din arming of suspects " defined as "
suspects" not only members of the outlawed classes and their families,
like the nobility and Irk fractory clergy, but anyone recognized as such by
the authorities. The law on the suspects of September I7th went a step
further.

It declared suspect all who had befriended tyranny, federalism and counter-revolution
by deed, word or by the way of personal I relations; persons who failed to
pay their taxes; people not I furnished with cartes de civisme from their
Sections; suspended or dismissed officials; nobles, their relatives and
relatives of e'migre's; persons unable to bring evidence of their rightful
means of earning a living and of their patriotic conduct in the past.
Concierges had earlier been ordered to post the names of the inhabitants of
the houses in their charge, and private homes were opened to search. The
decree of March 2Ist set up in every commune Comite's de surveillance,
recruited from the most faithful and charged with general supervision over
aliens and suspects, drawing up lists of the latter, and revising the
certificates of " civisme ". On March 28th a syccial law fixed the
death penalty for journalists and pamphleteers calling for the dissolution of
the Convention, the re-establishment of the monarchy, and attacking -the
people's sovereignty. On April 1st the parliamentary immunity of deputies to
the Convention was suspended. The Revolutionary Tribunal was properly set up,
after having had a fleeting existence as Tribunal Criminal Extraordi1'aire,
on April 5th. It was on that day freed from the supervision by the special
Conventional Committee, to which its predecessor was subject. Moreover the
need for Conventional authorization to start proceedings was waived.
Denunciation by one of the established authorities or by an ordinary citizen
was to be a sufficient ground, except in case of deputies, commanding
generals and similar high dignitaries. The jury was to vote and make its
declarations publicly and " a haute voix ". There was no appeal,
and the punishments were death and confiscation of property. The month of
October, which saw the Republic triumphant on all war fronts, instead of
seeing the Terror abate, marked its intensification against the leading
political groups and personalities in opposition. The signal event was the
trial and execution of the twenty-two Girondist deputies expelled from the
Convention on June 2nd, among them Vergniaud, Gensonne, Brissot, Lasource
(Roland committed suicide, Mme Roland was guillotined). They were delivered
by the . Convention to the Tribunal on a unanimous vote, and were sentenced
unanimously after proceedings lasting three days, the time thought sufficient
for the jury to have their " conscience sufficiently enlightened ",
so as to be able to dispense with further examination of evidence and
witnesses. Four days were also thought sufficient to enlighten the conscience
of the jury on the crimes of Hebert, Momoro, Vincent, Anacharsis Cloots and
their friends, sentenced on March 24th, 1794. Danton, Desmoulins, Philippeaux
were sent to the guillotine about a fortnight later, also at the end of four
days, after the Convention had at the instigation of Saint Just voted them
unanimously " hors des debate ", as guilty of plotting to destroy
the Revolutionary Government and restore the Monarchy. Political
centralization focused in the Committee of Public Safety was followed by
judicial centralization focused in the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris.
Saint-Just carried, in April, a motion that all persons accused of conspiracy
wherever they be should be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris.
The decree of May I 8th (29 Floreal), proposed by Couthon, the third,
crippled member of the Robespierrist triumvirate, and executor of the
rebellious city of Lyons, suppressed all Revolutionary Tribunals and
Revolutionary Commissions outside Paris. Then on dune 10Th, 1794, came the
famous laws of Prairial-suggested by 'Couthon. They marked the-crowning point
of the Terror and were based on the axiom that the annihilation of the
enemies of the Revolution took prudence- over formal justice. 'Any kind of evidence,
material, noral, or verb al " que p cut naturellement ob tenir l'
assentiment de it esprit juste et raisonable" was declared acceptable as
legal evi`''lence, the need for examining witnesses being dispensed with. The
right of the defendant to plead before the Revolutionary Tribunal was
suspended. The right to denounce conspirators and persons guilty of "
incivisme" was accorded to all citizens. The right of delivering
suspects to the Tribunal was extended to the two Committees (Public Safety
and General Security), the Public Prosecutor, Representatives on Mission and
the Convention. The Convention was deprived of its exclusive right of handing
over deputies to the Tribunal. This measure sent a shudder down every spine
in the Convention. It drove those who felt themselves most menaced, Fouche,
Ta]lien, Barras, Freron, to desperation, and together with the disagreements
between the Robespierrists and their colleagues on the execution of
Saint-Just's laws of Ventose on the expropriation of the suspects and the
distribution of their property to poor patriots, brought down Robespierre and
his system on 9 Thermidor. Although the Robespierrists were outdistanced in
sheer terrorist passion by those who destroyed them, they were nevertheless
among the chief apostles of Terror. The redoubtable ' , Bureau de Police, the
special and most exclusive department of the l I Committee of Public Safety,
set up to keep a watch and prosecute in the first place civil servants, was
presided over by them, especially Saint-Just. As early as August pith, 1793,
Robespierre formulated the philosophy of Terror by demanding that the
Revolutionary Tribunal be freed from all encumbrances of old-fashioned legal
restraints to pass death sentences, the only type of punishment appropriate in
the circumstances of treason. Jacobin dictatorship rested~wo pillars: the
fanatical devotion of the faithful, and stringent orthodoxy. The combination
of the two was the secret of Jacobin strength, and a new phenomenon in
~,nodern political history. Having started as a movement for popular
self-expression and permanent debate, to share in joyous , communion the
experience of exercising popular sovereignty, Jacobinism soon developed into
a confraternity of faithful, who must lose their selves in the objective
substance of the faith to regain their souls. Submission became in due course
release, obedience was turned into freedom, membership to the Jacobin clubs
became the outward sign of belonging to the elect and pure, participation in
Jacobin fetes and patriotic rites a religious experience. Inside the clubs
there was going on an unceasing process of self-cleansing and purification,
entailing denunciations, confessions, excommunication and expulsions. The
dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety was thus no mere tyranny of a
handful of men clinging to power and In possession of all the means of
coercion, no mere police system in a beleaguered fortress. It rested on
closely knit and highly disciplined cells and nuclei in every town and
village, from the central artery of Paris to the smallest hamlet in the
mountains, composed of men only waiting with enthusiastic eagerness for a
sign, no more to express their spontaneous urge for freedom, but their
Revolutionary exaltation through obedient and fervent execution of orders
from the centre, the seat of the enlightened and infallible few. In the way
of pure improvisation there grew up in Revolutionary France an unofficial
organization of French democracy, duplicating as it were the official
organism and its parts, manning the Revolutionary armies, and the Comite's de
surveillance, engaging in the task of what Robespierre called " colerer
" the sans-culottes, that is to say the task of indoctrinating and
making them ready to deal with the wicked rich, the federalists and other
counter-revolutionaries, often, again as Robespierre urged, especially
staying behind, when others had been sent to the front, to watch the rear and
fight the internal enemy; dominating by their ceaseless vigilance all
assemblies, managing all elections, providing, as instructed, the right
Interpretation of all events. The official dogma claimed that the Jacobins
were the people 1 They could possible regular as a partial will, as just a
party like other parties. Robespierre had said that the " Jacobin
society was ' by its very nature incorruptible. It deliberated before an
audience of a few thousand' persons so that its whole power lay in public
opinion, and it could not betray the interests of the people." Camille
Desmoulins had earlier in the Revolution called the popular societies the
inquisitorial tribunals of the people. He used the term with fervent
approval. What he meant to say was that they were the open forum for ideas to
be scrutinized, clarified and purified through free and continuous
discussion. Desmoulins lived to' realize to the full the horror of the
popular inquisition which'he so enthusiastically helped to build up. It was
in the course of that dramatic clash at the Jacobin Club, when Robespierre,
who earlier had half patronizingly, half menacingly admonished him not to be
so flexible and volatile in his opinions, called for the burning of Camille's
Vieux Cordelier, the proofs of which Desmoulins was in the habit of showing
to the Incorruptible for approval. " Burning is no answer,"
whispered the darling of the Revolution. And so the postulate of plebiscitary
popular sovereignty came to fruition in the rule of a small fraction of the
nation; the idea of unhampered popular self-expression in an ever narrower
path of exclusive orthodoxy, and a ban on the slightest difference of opinion
and sentiment. It is enough to read the records of the Jacobin Club in the
last months before Thermidor, the indicting speeches of Robespierre and
Saint1ust or the references given by Crane Brinton in his study on the
provincial Jacobin societies to realize to what lengths this process had
gone. To have remained silent on some past and half ¿forgotten occasion,
where one should have spoken; to have spoken where it was better to hold
one's peace; to have shown empathy where eagerness was called for, and
enthusiasm where diffidence was necessary; to have consorted with somebody
whom a patriot should have shunned; avoided one who deserved to be
befriended; not to have shown a virtuous disposition, or not to have led a
life of virtue-such and other " sins " came to be counted as
capital opulence, classifying the sinners as members of that immense chain of
treason comprising the foreign plot, Royalism, federalism, bureaucratic
sabotage, food speculation, immoral wealth, and vicious selfish perversion.
Special lists were drawn up for aspirants to admission and affiliation to
elicit answers as to the attitude taken up in the past to, and as to the
present appreciation of, every event of the Revolution. The ascendancy of
Robespierre appears from the Jacobin records to have become truly religious.
A disapproving word, a mere glance from the Incorruptible were enough to
ensure the immediate expulsion of any speaker whom Robespierre felt to have
gone a little too far, even though only a few seconds earlier tile orator had
been wildly applauded. Virtue had been " put on the agenda " to
confound the wicked. Robespierre and Saint-Just were the " apostles of
virtue ", as the insurrectionary Manifesto of the Commune on 9
Therrnidor called them. It is important to throw a glance at least at the
evolution of foreign policy in the Revolution from the angle of the global
war for liberty. Similarities between the two spheres, internal and external
policy, abound. The Revolution, bred on a humanitarian philosophy, started on
a most pacifist note. Men were deeply convinced that the natural state among
nations was that of peace. All trouble came from the dynasties in pursuit of
selfish aggrandizement. They divide nations and cause all wars. Hence the
famous declaration, which the realistic Mirabeau viewed with such skepticism,
that France renounces war as an instrument of national policy and expansion.
The complex factors, political and psychological, conscious and unconscious, which
created in France an almost universal desire for war against, old Europe,
cannot be analyzed here. Clearly, the dynamism of a Messianic creed was
spilling over. There was hardly a person among the Revolutionaries who was
not, when the war broke out, convinced that FronrP had tar' with and would do
nothing to sublusrate nations and seize their territory. For the Revolution
was fighting a common global struggle for the liberation of peoples from the
yoke of dynastic tyrannies, and for a harmonious union of nations. When
liberating alien territory, France would not interfere with the wishes of the
liberated population, and would not impose any regime. .But these good
intentions were doomed to remain an academic postulate. ~ loo free a people,
to enable it to make a free choice, what the Revolution proclaimed its duty
to do, obviously entailed the immediate abolition of the feudal system,-and
the introduction of the principle of popular sovereignty. -- Such an initial
step could not be termed non-interference. As the war was global, France
could not possibly leave feudal enemies in power and at large to sabotage her
war effort and stab her in the back But also from the point of view of the
local Revolutionaries, who found themselves in a situation similar to that of
the French Revolutionaries fighting their own counter-revolutionaries, only
aggravated by the fact of collaboration with a foreign power, there was the
supreme necessity of suppressing the counter-revolutionary enemy by all
means. France was shedding her blood, spending her energies and impoverished
resources; she was on the brink of bankruptcy and famine, with inflation
running wild-who could demand from her that she should also bear the costs of
liberating other peoples ? Indeed, it was only fair that they should pay for
I l their liberation themselves. " The war must pay for itself" The
foreign nations must accept the dreaded worthless French assignat. The feudal
lords, the Church, the rich in general must be soaked I L The confiscated feudal
property would come into the hands of the lower orders, while the poor would
be spared impositions and taxation. Whole classes would thus become vitally
interested in the victory of the Revolution, and a tremendous social and
economic Revolution would have been achieved: " Guerre aux chateaux paix
aux chaumieres " was the famous formula of Cambon. The i war is
global-this was the underlying thesis of the famous Declar- | ation of
November Igth, 1792, that France pledges herself to hasten to assist every
people wishing to become free. It was a blank e cheque given to any rebellion
in any part of the world, and from I the point of view of old Europe, an
imperialist French provocation I designed to foment rebellion everywhere in
order to justify French aggression and conquest. ~ On December 1st came the
extension of the November' l VOLONTE UNE ~ 3 I Declaration. It declared that
a liberated population, which failed to adopt the institutions of liberty and
popular sovereignty, thereby declared itself a friend of tyranny and an enemy
of France in the global war. A time limit was later set for the liberated
peoples to show convincingly where they stool And so the freedom of choosing
liberty, which the Revolution set out-to give to the nations, became
transformed into an obligation to choose liberty. But the French were far
from admitting to themselves-or to others-that they were violating the
freedom of the liberated populations. There could be no doubt about the
ultimate wishes of the peoples concerned. They were terrorized by their old
masters, timid and backward, and they must be freed, without regard to their
inhibitions. Popular assemblies must be summoned to adopt by acclamation the
institutions of liberty. Naturally, feudal and clerical reactionaries must be
excluded and prevented from intimidating the people and falsifying its true
will. In Belgium and elsewhere Revolutionary leadership was weak and
inexperienced, and the masses under the spell of the Church. French
commissars must therefore be sent to arrange elections, and to take charge of
affairs, till the liberated people will have given itself a free
Constitution, and shown ability to live in accordance with it. The global
war, requiring a Revolutionary regime at home, necessitated a similar regime
towards the peoples abroad, in order to force the nations to be free: "
Ce pouvoir revolutionnaire qui n'est qu'un pouvoir protecteur de la liberte
politique a son berceau," as Brissot put it. In 1790, Burke lamented the
disintegration of the French body politic by the spirit of anarchical
individualism. In 1796, he stood aghast before a wholly new phenomenon: a
State as an " armed doctrine ", quite unlike any ordinary
community, whose growth is haphazard, whose movements are hampered by the
inertia or resistance of infinite interests, traditions and habits, and
" which makes war through wantonness, and abandons it through lassitude
". Revolutionary France " is struck out at a heat . . . systematic
. . . simple in its principle, it has unity and consistency ~ perfection ; it
Is able to mobilize men and resources and to subordinate all to the single
principle of its being-" the production of force ", to further the
cause of the Revolution. " Individuality . is left out of their scheme
of government. The state is all in all." 1 .

Chapter Four ULTIMATE SCHEME

(a) THE POSTULATE OF PROGRESS AND FINALITY No longer necessary as a
defensive weapon, the Terror was gradually becoming an instrument for the
enthronement of a positive purpose. This purpose was the natural and harmonious
system of society prophesied by the philosopher. The existence of such an
order was a certainty. It had been on the way since the first days of the
Revolution. It would have been there already, if it were not for the
selfishness and perversion of some people. In fact to Robespierre victory in
the national war was not the main purpose. He feared a too speedy and too
victorious end to the war. It would knock the bottom out of the Terror, as
" it is natural to slumber after victory ". The enemies of the people
wishing to detract popular attention from their crimes, were endeavouring to
concentrate all eyes on the victories in the external war. But the real
victory will be the one which " the friends of liberty will win over the
factions". " C'est cette victoire qui appelle chez les peoples la
paix, la justice et le bonheur." A nation does not become illustrious by
beating down foreign tyrants and enchaining other peoples. " Ce fut lo
sort des Domains et quelques autres nations; notre destinee, beaucoup plus
sublime, est de fonder sur la terre ltempire de la sagesse, de la justice et
de la vertu." In brief, to enthrone the exclusive Jacobin pattern. kit
is vital for the understanding of Jacobinism to remember all the time that
the Jacobins sincerely and deeply believed that their terrorist dictatorship,
even when maintained for no compelling reason of defence, was nothing but a
prelude to a harmonious state of society, in which coercion would become
necessary. The regime of force was merely a provisional phase, an inescapable
evil at a deeper rev&1 and within a broader context no dictatorship at
al: Jacobinism was nurtured on a deep eighteenth-century faith in man, his
essential goodness and perfectibility, and on the belief continuous social
progress, at the end of which there was some terminus of social integration
and harmony. Not a permanently pessimistic conception of man and society bred
Jacobin Terror, but an impatient hope, exasperated by obstacles, which ardent
faith refused to acknowledge as natural or inevitable. The mixture of
Messianic hope and despairing doubt gives to the Jacobin attitude a peculiar
passionate urgency and poignancy. There is grandeur in it, as well as
monumental self-deception and naivete. Robespierre and Saint-Just seem to
vibrate with the faith in a short cut to salvation. " It is time to fix
clearly the aim of the Revolution and the terminus (terme) at which we wish
to arrive," declared Robespierre solemnly in one of his last speeches.
He was proposing to " take the universe into confidence about the
political secrets of the French people ", and to map out the goal across
the maze of pragmatic and so often contradictory moves and incongruous
happenings: " idee simple et importance qui semble n'avoir jamais ete
aper,cue". When laying down the scheme of the Republican Institutions
for the Utopia of the future, Saint-Just in the same spirit expressed his
astonishment that nobody had thought of the scheme before. He could hardly
believe that truths so obvious, principles so salutary, remedies so
imperative, measures so practicable, should not have occurred to anybody
before. Both he and Robespierre, like most of their generation, firmly
believed that legislation was an easy science. All evils and all diversity of
regimes were the result of the mistaken view that it was a difficult art.
Men's hearts could be formed by laws. Men were meant to realize their destiny
and achieve happiness in a harmonious social system, easily brought about by
legislation and education. Their faith was, however, checked by the
disconcerting and dismal fact that things so obvious, simple and necessary
failed to be applied throughout all the centuries of man's career on earth.
Robespierre paraphrased Rousseau's famous opening paradox of the Social
Contract, declaring in his great speech on Religious Ideas that while Nature
NvaS telling us that man was born for liberty, the experience of centuries
showed him everywhere a slave; while man's rights were engraved in his heart,
his humiliation was writ large across history. Surveying the annals of man,
Saint-Just similarly concluded with dismay that " all arts had produced
their marvels, only the art of government has produced nothing but monsters
". " D'ou vient melange de genie et de stupidite ? " asks
Robespierre in reference to the wonderful progress of the arts and sciences,
and man's total ignorance of the elementary notions of political morality, of
his rights and duties. Robespierre's answer is that all the rulers of the
past, bent upon nothing else than upon retaining their power, had nothing to
fear from scientists and artists, but very much from " philosopher
rigides et defenseurs de lthumanite ". They could afford to encourage
the former, but had to persecute the latter. The Revolution was in this respect
an apocalyptic moment in history, the most important event in the career of
man upon earth, totally different from such episodes as the Cromwellian and
American Revolutions, outbreaks prompted by local grievances and driven by
limited aims. The French Revolution had as its aim " to put back the
destinies of liberty in the hands of truth which is eternal, rather than into
the hands of men who pass". This juxtaposition and this contrasting of
an objective and eternal truth with the passing character of man should be
noted. " Vous commencez une nouvelle carriere ou personne ne vous a
devances." On more than one occasion did Robespierre proclaim that
Revolutionary France was thousands of years ahead of all other nations.
" All must be changed in the moral and political order," exclaims
Robespierre, and his words are re-echoed by Saint-Just. At the moment of the
Revolution, the world resembled the globe, half of it was already
enlightened, while the other part was still plunged in darkness. And here
faith and desperate anxiety alternate. At first there was boundless hope.
Thus in his speech in the Constituante on the unrestricted freedom of the
press, Robespierre claimed that the time had come for all truths to be spoken
out- " routes seront accueillies par le patriotisme ". As late as
July 8th, 1792, Robespierre hoped that the regeneration of the French people
could be accomplished without bloodshed. After the execution of the King he
still hoped that after this " great exception " the death penalty
would no longer be applied. As late as February, 1793, 14 claimed that the
new order was already so deeply rooted in French society that no real
reaction was possible. Human reason had been on the move for quite a time
" slowly and by detours, and yet surely ", and now the world was
witnessing the wonderful spectacle of " a democracy affirmed in a vast
empire ". " Those who in the infancy of public law and in the midst
of servitude have been stammering contrary maxims, did they foresee the
marvels accomplished in one year ? " Quite a different mood is expressed
in Robespierre's last speech, where he confessed to see only dupes andiripons
in the world, and only very few generous men loving virtue for its own sake
and disinterestedly desirous of the people's happiness. A similar sentiment
is expressed in a striking passage in Saint-Just's Institutions Republicans
written some time in 1794. Its epigrammatic style breathes an uncanny air,
the air of the Terror at its height. " No doubt, the time to do good has
not yet come. The particular good that one may do is a palliative. We have to
wait for a general evil that would be great enough for public opinion to
experience the need of proper measures to do good. That which produces the
general good is always terrible, or appears bizzare, when started too early.
The Revolution should halt at the perfection of happiness and public liberty
by the laws. Its tides have no other objectives, they must overthrow all that
opposes them." " People speak of the height of the Revolution ? Who
will fix it ? There have been free peoples who have fallen from greater
heights." The elation at what had been so miraculously achieved, the
amazement at ideas having become flesh, are matched by the anxiety lest men
falter, and " intrigue " succeeds in overpowering virtue for
generations. It is " now or never", for in case of failure the
reaction would be commensurate to the distance covered by the Revolution, as
if the Revolution were about to reach the peak of a sharp slope. If there was
no advance to the summit, there would be a headlong fall into the abyss.
Passionate faith enmeshed in anxiety and despair breaks forth time after
time. Repeatedly Robespierre and Saint-Just declared that this or that decree
or purge was the last, the very last, and the one sure to inaugurate the
natural order. " If only they had thought of that particular thing, the
l'~stitutions Republicaines, all the evils might have been avoided, all the
crimes would not have happened !" exclaims Saint-Just.

(b) THE DOCTRINAIRE MENTALITY Here we are face to face with the Messianic
doctrinaire as a historic phenomenon. He is a compound of two things, inner
fanatical certainty, and what may be called a pencil sketch of reality. The
pencil lines represent the external facets of social existence, in fact the
sinews of the institutional framework. The flesh of the intangible, shapeless
living forces, traditions, impondErables, habits, human inertia and lazy
conservatism are not there. They are ignored. Left out of account are also
the uniqueness and the unpredictability of human nature and human conduct,
which result either from the irrational segments ill. our being, or from man'
egotism. The Revolutionary doctrinaires convinced that his pencil sketch is
the only real thing, that it sums up all that matters. He experiences
reality, not as an inchoate static mass, but as a denouement, a dynamic
movement towards a rational solution. The amorphous fleshy mass is unreal,
and can be brought into shape in accordance with the pencil pattern. It is
not something that is, but something that fails to be, that is not yet what
it should be. Similarly, human idiosyncrasies and peculiarities that
interfere with the rational working of the systematic, abstract pattern are
not something that must be taken for granted, but an accident to be
prevented, removed or avoided. Nor is the fact that a triumphant doctrine is
after all embodied in the living personalities of those in charge, and is
thus bound to receive their personal imprint and become distorted, ever
noticed. Hence patterns of Left totalitarianism are so universalist in their
character, and ignore completely national and local characteristics, just as
they seem completely unaware of the problem of the personal element in
leadership and oblivious of the place of the actual human personality in the
working of politics. It is their nemesis and one of the ironies of history
that the personal leader, like a dens ex machina, is thrown up by the
movement of realization to become its most vital factor and its embodiment,
the head of the militant confratemity of the elect in its struggle against
all the powers of darkness. When the Revolutionary doctrinaire is thwarted by
the inchoate, " unreal " mass of flesh and the " irrational
" egotistic behaviour of men, his impatience turns into exasperation.
The resisting forces appear a dumb, stupid mass that will not budge, for no
other reason than sheer obstinacy, or-in the case of individuals-perversion
and egoism. This resistance appears to the Revolutionary the more baffling and
exasperating, because at the great moment of the Revolutionary climax of
popular self-expression the enthusiasm appeared to be so general, so active
and so single-minded. The fact is that the Revolutionary spasm is in the
emotional sense a magnificently simplified formula of existence reduced to a
single emotion, as the pencil sketch is in the intellectual sphere. The
undiluted Revolutionary ecstasyls of very short duration. Soon men drift back
into the morass of obtuse conservatism, selfishness or neutral privacy. The
impatience and violence of the rationalist doctrinaire soon turns the initial
mass enthusiasm into resentful hostility towards the Revolutionary pattern.
It has always happened in modern Revolutions that as the inner dynamism of
the pencil-sketch Revolution continued to throw forth ever more extreme
doctrinaires, the inarticulate masses grew increasingly more indifferent and
hostile to the Revolutionary endeavour. The case of religion in the French
Revolution is the classical example of the clash between the rationalist
doctrine and the forces of irrational conservatism. No other factor was so
fatal to the Revolution as the attack on the Church. The new, ever increasing
rigidity of the pattern has always resulted in sharper and sharper clashes,
greater fissures and splits at the top. Fanatical dictatorship causes the
problem of human egotism to grow more acute in relation to the advance of
Gleichschaltung. And so it happened that many a Revolutionary who started
with and put his trust in the institutions of a pencil-sketch doctrine to
solve all problems, hoping that conditions and men would fall in by
themselves into the harmonious whole, ended with a desperate determination to
create like Moses a new type of man and a new people. At the beginning of the
French Revolution there was the Declaration of the Rights of Man, at its
height Saint-Just's Institutions Re'publicaines, Robespierre's cult of the
Supreme Being and the Lepeletier scheme of Spartan Education, adopted by the
Incorruptible after the Revolutionary nartyr's death. The doctrinaire never
thinks of the pencil sketch in terms of coercion. It is not intended to
interfere with freedom; on the contrary, it is designed to secure it. Only
the ill-intentioned, the selfish and perverse can complain that their freedom
is violated. They are guilty of sabotage, refusing to be free, and misleading
others. They cannot be given freedom to do their evil deeds, for they are at
war with the pattern of freedom that continues to unfold itself till its full
realization. Liberty can be restored only after this has come to an end, only
when the enemy has been eliminated and the people re-educated, that is to
say, when there will be no longer any opposition. So long as there is
opposition there can be no freedom. " The Revolution will come to an end
", said Robespierre in the Speech on the Principles of Political
Morality, " in a very simple Nay, and without being harassed by the
factions, when all people will have become equally devoted to their country
and its laws. But we are still far from having reached that point.... The
Republican Government is not yet well established, and there are
factions." The Revolutionary Government has two objects: the protection
of patriotism and the annihilation of aristocracy. The goal will never be
achieved as long as the factions continue to sabotage the effort. " It
will be an impossible thing to establish liberty on unshakable foundations as
long as any individual can say to himself: ' if to-day aristocracy is triumphant,
I am lost.' " The " institutions sages " of the Utopian
pattern can be founded only on the ruins of the incorrigible enemies of
liberty. Robespierre used in this context the term democracy. It meant to
him, on the one hand, a form of government, and on the other, a social and
moral pattern. As a form of government it signified, innocuously enough, a
state of things where the sovereign people, guided by laws made by itself,
was making by itself all that it could do by itself, and through chosen
representatives what it could not do by itself Robespierre came out strongly
against direct democracy on this occasion. There was no need for it any
longer; the people had trustworthy representatives. As a social and moral
pattern democracy was the only system capable of fulfilling the wishes of
Nature, realizing the destinies of mankind, and making good the promises of
philosophy by the enthronement of egalitarian virtue, which is another name
for the universal preference of the general interest over the private good, for
love of country and equality and the death of egoism. The reign of virtue
could not be established as long as there were parties, which were by
definition selfish factions. And so to obtain the rule of virtue the war of
liberty against tyranny must first be brought to an end, the factions
annihilated, and the storm of the Revolution overcome by the Revolutionary
Government. " Votre administration dolt etre le resultat de ['esprit du
gouvernement revolutionnaire, combine avec les principes generaux de la democratic."
Liberty has however no meaning without freedom to oppose, and without there
being anybody to oppose. The vision of unfettered freedom at the end of the
days, and the prophecy of the cessation of the conflict between freedom and
duty, in spontaneous obedience without a sense of constraint, turns out to be
a fiction, I wherever there is an idea of a fixed pattern ofthings to be
enthroned by a sustained effort.

Saint-Just would have passionately repudiated any suggestion of
dictatorship as a permanent form of government. It is baffling to read on the
same page expressions of the human liberal eighteenth century spirit,
juxtaposed with the most bloodthirsty denunciations. What Saint1ust had to
say on power might have come straight from the pen of Lord Acton. "
Power is so cruel and evil that if you release it from its inertia, without
giving it a direction (regle), it will march straight on to oppression....
One wants to be rigid in one's principles, when destroying an evil
government, but it is rare that one should not reject the same principles, to
substitute for them one's own will, as soon as one comes to govern
oneself" Saint-Just professed to be particularly fearful of a
provisional form of government, since it was based upon the suppression of
the people, and not on law or natural harmony. It was an invitation to any
usurper to establish a tyranny by the promise of peace and order, and an
excellent excuse to crush all opposition. In the Constitutional debate he
warned the Convention that even the rights of man and constitutional
liberties could become a weapon in the hands of a " gentle tyrant "
who had designs on the freedom of the nation. Not force, but wisdom, should
be used in dealing with the people, for the people were essentially good and
just, and could be governed without being enslaved or becoming licentious.
Man was born for peace and happiness and for life in society. His misery and
corruption were the results of insidious laws of domination, and of the
doctrine of man's savage and corrupt nature. Having let themselves be
persuaded by the tyrants that they would destroy each other if left free, the
peoples bent their heads to the yoke of despotism and grew demoralized under
its corroding influence. " Every people is made for virtue . . . it
should not be forced it should be led by wisdom. The French are easy to
govern; they want a mild constitution.... This people is lively and suited
for democracy, but it should not be worn out too much by the encumbrance of
public affairs. It should be governed without weakness, I but also without
constraint." I Fundamental in all this is Saint-Just's conviction that
there was an inherent harmony in society. The task of a government was not to
unpose its own will or its own pattern upon a society, but to remove the
impediments to that harmony, a purpose for which to terror had been
instituted. Harmony was bound to come into its own, when all elements of
social existence had been put in their proper place. " Le government est
plutot un ressort d'harmonie que d'autorite." The abolition of tyranny
was bound to bring man back to his true nature. " Item la tyrannic du
monde, vous y retablirez la paix et la vertu." The people would find its
happiness by itself The Government's task was not so much to make men happy
as to prevent them from becoming unhappy. " Do not oppress, that is all.
Everybody will know how to find his own happiness." A people once
infected with the superstitious belief that they owed their happiness to
their Government would not present it for long. Crowds thronging the
antechambers of tribunals and state offices were eloquent evidence of the
rottenness of the Government. " C'est une horreur qu'on soil oblige de
demander justice." The private lives of citizens should be interfered
with as little as possible. " The liberty of a people is in its private
life; do not disturb it. Disturb no one but the evil-doers." Force
should be used only to protect the " state of simplicity' against force
itself, and nothing should be imposed except probity, and respect for
liberty, nature, human rights and the national representation. , There was
meant to be a social order in which men's sentiment and actions would by
themselves set themselves into so harmonious a pattern that all coercion
would be superfluous. With laws to his nature, man would cease to be unhappy
and corrupt. Ev having become alien to his interests, justice would become
the permanent and determining interest and passion of all, and libert would
reign supreme. The Revolutionary task is to make " nature and innocence
the passion of all hearts". Such a change can b brought about earlier
than people think, declares Saint-Just. This faith is deeply rooted in the
eighteenth-century premises -- reaffirmed by Robespierre in his speeches on
the Revolutionary order. The Revolutionary aim was to vindicate the idea of
costar pragmatism on earth, and so arrange things that all that was moo would
also be useful and politic, and what was immoral would b impolitic, harmful
and counter-revolutionary. Robespierre distinguished-in line with
Rousseau-two kinds of self-love, one v and cruel, which seeks one's own
exclusive good in the misery o others, and the other, which, generous and
benevolent, confounds in our well-being with the prosperity and glory of the
country. Of the marriage of the natural order and man's virtuous disposition
there would be born the identity of the personal and general good. Real
democracy would thus come into fruition, since men would be obeying nothing
but their own virtuous disposition, and would not need the master, who is
indispensable where virtue is not natural and spontaneous. The supreme aim of
politics was therefore, as Mably maintained, to direct human hearts, to
educate men, to repress the " moi personnel " and the proclivity for
small, petty things. According to the direction given to human passion, man
could be elevated to the skies or debased to the lowest pit. " Le but de
toutes les institutions sociales, c' est de les diriger vers la patrie, qui
cst a la fois le bonheur public et le bonheur privet" If politics were
to the eighteenth century a question of ethics, the problem of the rational
and final social order was a question of attuning hearts. This was the vital
discovery made by the Jacobins, after the disappointment with popular
sovereignty and its institutions as virtue-releasing forces. the new and
continuing disagreements could not, or at least could no longer or not fully,
tee explained iZI terms of the conflict between Royalism and Revolution or
between ruling and ruled classes, and there were many factors to obscure the
social and economic problem. " A quoi se reduit done cette science
mysterieuse de la politique et de la legislation ? A mettre dans les lois et
darts l'admir,Zistration les vcrites morales releguees dans les livres des
philosopher, et appliquer a la conduite des peoples les notions triviales de
probite He chacun est force d'adopter pour sa conduite privee." AD is
reduced to a question of morality, and consequently education. All the rest
will follow, claims Saint-Just. Objective factors are left out of account,
only human consciousness matters. The irrational anti-social, anarchical
elements in man are considered accidental; only the rational and social part
of human nature is acknowledged as real and permanent. The former exist, for
surer but can be made to efface themselves before the latter. Man, an] I
consequently society as a whole, may be shaped anew-" Quel est is but ou
nous tendons ? " asks Robespierre. His long answer may be treated as
mere verbiage and turgid preaching. But, once , more, Robespierre believed
that the vision he was spinning was f something attainable, real, and full of
precise, compact meaning. sl" The passage from crime to virtue " to
be accomplished by the Revolution meant to Robespierre a real event, a
turning point, new birth, a definite date, like the passage from a class
society to classless society was to mean to Communist Messianism. The aim is
" the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality-; the reign of that eternal
justice, the laws of which are engraved not on marble or stone, but in the
hearts of all men, even in that of a slave who forgets them or a tyrant who
denies them. We want an order of things where all base and cruel passions
would be chained all the benevolent and generous passions awakened by the
laws, where one's ambition would be to merit glory and to serve his country;
where distinctions have no other source than equality itself; where the
citizen is subordinated to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people and
the people to justice; where the country insures the well-being of every
individual, and where every individual enjoys with pride the prosperity and
glory of his country; where all souls grow greater through the continuous
interchange of republican sentiments, and by the need to merit the esteem of
a great people; where the arts would be the ornament of that liberty which
ennobles them, and commerce the source of public wealth and not only of the
monstrous opulence of a few houses. We want to substitute in our country
morality for egoism, probity.for honour, principles for habits, duties for
good manners, the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, the contempt
of vice for the contempt of misfortune; pride for insolence, greatness of
soul for vanity, love of glory for the love of money; good men for good
companyment for intrigue, genuus for bet esprit, truth for brilliance . . . a
people magnanimous, powerful, happy, for a people amiable, frivolous and
miserable, that is to say all the virtues and all the miracles of the
Republic for all the vices and absurdities of the Monarchy." Has there
ever been such a state on earth ? Throughout the centuries of uninterrupted
tyranny and crime, history knows only of one brief spell of liberty in a tiny
corner of the earth-Sparta " brille comme un eclair dans les tenebres
immerses." This is the key to the understanding of Robespierre and
Saint-Just: Sparta as the ideal of liberty. " Let us beware of
connecting politics with moral regeneration -a thing at present
impracticable. Moralism is fatal to freedom "- wrote Desmoulins. For the
creation of this ideal Robespierre falls back upon the civil religion and
Saint-Just upon a Utopian scheme of moral legislation called by him
Republican Institutions. In both cases the motive is despair in the
spontaneous will of man as the sovereign agent. More than
disillusionment-desperate fear. Man had to be remade.

(d) SAINT-JUST S INSTITUTIONS R~PUBLICAINES Saint1ust developed a mystical
faith in the power of his Republican Institutions to check man's anti-social
arbitrary urges, to regenerate the French people and to reconcile all
contradictions in a perfect harmony founded upon virtue. They were to be the
crowing of the Revolution, the seal upon the Revolution. " Un etat ou
ces institutions manquent n'est qu'une Republique illusoire." They were
the essence of a Republic, for the superiority of a Republic over a Monarchy
was precisely in this, that the latter had no more than a government, while
the former also had Institutions to realize the moral purpose. " C'est
par la que vous annoncerez la perfection de votre democratic . . . la
grandeur de vos vues, et que vous haterez la perte de vos ennemis en les
montrant difformes a cote de vous." Clearly, he thought of the Republic
in terms if not of the Church, at least of a spiritual community, and of the
Institutions as inaugurating the " passage from crime to virtue ".
In Saint-Just's last and heroic (undelivered) speech of 8 Thermidor in
defence of Robespierre the Republican Institutions appear as the panacea that
had fatally been ignored, and which alone, as said before, can save the
situation, making all the difference between total damnation and total
salvation. The factions will never disappear till the Institutions have produced
the guarantees, put a limit to authority and put " human pride
irrevocably under the yoke of public liberty ". Saint-Just implores
Providence to give him a few days more " pour appeller sur les
institutions les meditations dupeuple franc,ais". All the tragedy they
had been witnessing would not have occurred under their rule. " ns
seraient vertueux peut-etre, et ntauraient point pense au mal ceux
dontj'accuse ici." The speech ends with a formal proposal for immediate
consideration of the scheme of the Republican Institutions. Saint-Just's
scheme of regeneration was intended to offer a cure for the corroding
influence of power and the danger of the substitution of the ruler's personal
will for the law as well as to shape a universal pattern of moral behaviour.
The proposed Institutions were to lay down so precise and detailed a system
of laws that no room would be left for arbitrary human action, or indeed for
spontaneity. People would not be obeying men, but laws, laws of reason and
virtue, and therefore of liberty. Politics would thus be entirely banished.
" We have to substitute with the help of the Institutions the force and
inflexible justice of the laws for personal influence. The Revolution will
thus be strengthened; there will be no jealousies, no factions any longer;
there will be no pretentious claims and no calumny . . . we have . . . to
substitute the ascendancy of virtue for the ascendancy of men.... Make
politics powerless by reducing all to the cold rule of justice." The
Institutions would be a more effective brake on antirevolutionary tendencies
than the Terror. For the Terror comes and goes according to the fluctuations
of public opinion and sentiment, and the reaction to terror has normally been
an excessive indulgence. The institutional laws would secure " a durable
severity". The Institutions were calculated to make the art of
government simpler, easier and more effective. For instance, more wisdom and
greater virtue would be needed for the exercise of the only of censorship over
conduct-an idea particularly dear to Saints Just-in a weak government than in
a strong one, that is to say, in a regime based upon Institutions. For in a
weak government all depended on the character of the men in charge, whereas
in a strong regime the laws provided for everything and secured a perfect
harmony, in excluding all the unpredictable elements in human behaviour.
" Dans le premier, il y a une action et reaction continuelle des forces
particulieres; dans le second, il y a une force commune dont chacun fait
partie, et qui concourt au meme but et au meme Lien." In his fear of
human egotism and, above all, of the competition between personalities,
Saintlust devised a most paradoxical plan As there should be fewer
institutions and fewer men in charge, and since it was essential that an
institution should operate by its own harmony and without being thwarted by
the interplay and clash of men's arbitrary wills, it was-he thought-important
to reduce the number of people in the institutions and the constituted authorities
In this connection Saint-Just called for a re-examination of collective
magistratures like the municipalities, administrative bodies, Comity箂''rveillar~ce,
etc., to see whether the placing of " the functions of these bodies in
the hands of a single official in everyone of them would not be the secret of
a solid establishment ofthe Revolution ". Into this context have to be
set the nearly identical statements of Barere, Prieur de la Cote-d'Or, Baudot
and Lindet, according to which Saintlust at a joint meeting of the two
Committees on s Thermidor proposed the setting up of a government by "
patriotic reputations (or deputations ?) pending the establishment of the
Republican Institutions ". Barere quotes him as saying that it was
imperative to hand over dictatorial powers to a man " endowed with
su~lcient genius, strength, patriotism and greatness of soul . . .
sufficiently imbued with the spirit of the Revolution, the spirit of its
principles, its various phases, actions and agencies-to take upon himself the
full responsibility for public safety and the n~aintenance of liberty . . . a
man enjoying the favour of public opinion and the confidence of the people .
. . " " Cet homme, je declare que c'est Robespierre, lui senl peut
sauver l'lltat," SaintJust is reported to have said, in the spirit, one
may add, of his famous statement-" il faut dans toute Revolution un
dictateur pour sauver ['{tat par la force, ou des censeurs pour le sauver
parla vertu". From both statements there is only a short step to the generalized
theory of Revolutionary dictatorship as formulated later by Babenf and
Buonarroti. A dictator " qui puisse repondre . . . du maintien de la
liberte . . ."-the dictatorship of Robespierre would have been a "
dictatorship of liberty". Fearing the competition of men, Saint-Just was
thus driven back to the idea of one man. Believing in the power of
institutions to achieve everything and to eliminate the rule of men, he had
nevertheless to fall back upon the single-mindedness and smooth efficiency secured
by a single mind. Saint-Just got himself involved in the inevitable
contradictions presented by the two irreconcilable principles: sovereignty of
the people and an exclusive doctrine. While anxious to expel the
arbitrariness of man and all opposition by an all-embracing yet exclusive
system of laws, Saint-Just was not less keen to preserve the active interest
of the people in their own a¿C ¿airs. He abhorred nothing more than the
monopolization of public affairs by bureaucracy, ambitious professional politicians
and seekers of office. He feared nothing more than the indifference of the
masses. He was to see this happen, and to admit to himself that very few
people were interested in anything but their private affairs, and that most
people took a " lache plaisir a se meter de rien ". The magistrate)
were rapidly usurping the Government as well as the popular societies,
destroying the young French democracy, whose very essence was the supremacy
of the people and not of of licials. " Of done est la cite ? " he
asked himself in despair. " Wile est preside usurpee par les
fonctionnaires." A spirit of clique and caucus was abroad. The Terror
has frightened away the citizens. I' La Revolution est glacee; tous les
principes vent affaiblis; il ne reste que des bonnets rouges portes par
['intrigue. L'exercise de la terreur a blase le crime comme les liqueurs
fortes blasent le palais" Saint-Just's community of the future is placed
under the auspice' of the Supreme Being. " The French people ", he
declares, " recog nize the Supreme Being and the immortality of the
soul." The temples of the civic religion, where incense would be burnt
for twenty-four hours a day, were to be the communal centres of the Republic.
All laws were to be announced there and all civil acts apart from special
patriotic fetes-were to take place there and be the character of religious
rites. Although all cults would be pe mitted, the external rites other than
of the civil religion would b banned. The Institutions lay down a detailed
scheme of a Spartan type for the education of youth by the State. The conduct
of young people as of civil servants was to be publicly scrutinized every ten
days the temple. Every person above the age of twenty-five was declare every
year who were his friends and his reasons for breaks friendships. Friends
would be held responsible for each other Disloyal and ungrateful persons
would be banished. Prescription concerning marriage, military discipline,
were similarly spartan! Solemn patriotic fetes were to inspire the people with
civic piety and national pride.

(e) THE CIVIL RELIGION AND CONDEMNATION OF INTELLECTUALS Individual
spontaneity has thus been replaced by the object) postulate of virtue;
freedom by the (uncoerced) acceptance or obligation; the idea of liberty by
the vision of an exclusive pattern. The other vital value in
eighteenth-century philosophy, rationalism, svas in the end made to give
place to mysticism. There was always the unresolved ambiguity in the
eighteenth century, especially Rousseauist, juxtaposition of the two
qualities of I the eighteenth-century ideal-its objective, eternal character,
and | itS being engraved in human hearts. The unresolved ambiguity seemed to
resolve the question of coercion. Since the objective truth was also immanent
in man's consciousness, there was no external coercion in forcing him to
follow it. There was also another ambiguity; on the one hand, the optimistic
hope that man (or the people) rendered free, and thus also moral, would I see
the truth and follow it; on the other, there was the fear of I human
arbitrariness and hubris. It soon developed in the case of Robespierre into a
distrust ofthe intellect. We saw him demanding that liberty be put into the
hands of " the truth that is eternal ", instead of being in the
hands of men who are passing creatures. Robespierre and Saintlust grew
suspicious of the intellect, as well as of wit. The sophisms of the brilliant
debater, the flexibility and individualism of the intellectual, appeared no
less dangerous than the partial interests in the earlier days of the
Revolution. Robespierre began to dream of " a rapid instinct which
without the belated help of reasoning " would lead man to do good and
shun evil. " La raison particuliere de chaque homme" was a sophist,
too easily yielding to the whisper of passion and too easily rationalizing
it. In one of his last speeches Robespierre made a violent attack on the
intellectuals, the men of letters, who had " dishonoured themselves
" in the Revolution. The Revolution was the achievement of the simple
people carried by their instinct and unsophisticated natural wisdom. " A
la honte eternelle de ['esprit, la raison du peuple en a fait seule tons les
frais.... Les prodiges qui ont immortalise cette epoque ont ete operes sons
vous et malgre vous." Any simple artisan had shown more insight into the
rights of man than the writers of books, who, nearly Republicans in 1788,
emerged as defenders of the King in 1793, like Vergnizud and Condorcet.
Robespierre takes up the cudgels for Rousseau of the Profession de foi d'un
Vicaire Savoyard against the atheism of the Encyclopacdists, and declares the
battle to be resumed. On his orders the busts of Helvetius and Mirabeau in
the Club are pulled down and broken. A war is declared on sophists.

The only power that can still the pernicious sophistic instill is
religion, the idea of an authority higher than man, which the final sanction
of morality. " What silences or replaces tl~ pernicious instinct, and
what makes good the insufficiency of hum. authority, is the religious
instinct which imprints upon our sq~ the idea of a sanction given to the
moral precepts by a power Cat iS higher than man. A crude Voltairian attitude
has been read into Robespierre`'~ utterances on the subject. He laid himself
open to the charge of opportunist social utilitarianism by his clumsy
statement that tell was not interested in religion as a metaphysician, but as
a statesman and social architect, to whom what was useful in the world and
good in practice was true, whatever its metaphysical validity. What
Robespierre wanted to say was not that since the populace would not be moved
by rational arguments to behave ethically, but by the fear of God, religion
had to be simply invented for the sake of the social order. He wanted to say
that in the light of cosmic pragmatism factual existencewas
sufEiicientlyproved bylogical and pragmatic coherence. The postulate of
justice and meaning in the universal and social order was a sufficient proof
of the existence of Divinity Without Divinity, transcendental reward end
punishment, the logical and righteous structure ofthe universe and society
would be without a basis. The absence of such a logical cohesion was
unthinkable, God therefore existed, and the soul was immortal. The test al
social cohesion was truer and more vital than scientific, philosophical and
theoretical tests. The life of a community was too solemn a fulfilment to be
tossed about by blind forces, which mete out thi same fate to good and bad,
patriots and egoists, and leave th oppressed with no consolation, victims of
triumphant evil selfish ness: " this kind of practical philosophy which,
by turning egoism into a system, regards human society as a war of cunning,
success as the criterion of justice and injustice, probity as a matter oftaste
" Morality is what it is, not because God has ordered it and we have to
obey. We do not fulfil ourselves in the fruition of God The starting point
and the sole and final criterion is the existence of men in society; the
absolute postulate, the morality that sustains it The fully integrated
community becomes thus the highest fulfilment, the highest form of worship.
Providence hovers over it. |

Chapter Five THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

(a) TEIE INCONSISTENCIES THE great dividing line between the two major
schools of social and economic thought in the last two centuries has been the
attitude to the basic problem: should the economic sphere be considered an
open field for the interplay of free human initiative, skill, resources and
needs, with the State intervening only occasionally to fix the most general
and liberal rules of the game, to help those who have fallen by the wayside,
to punish those guilty of foul play and to succour the victims thereof; or
should the totality of resources and human skill be ah initio treated as
something that should be deliberately shaped and directed, in accordance with
a definite principle, this principle being-in the widest sense-the
satisfaction of human needs. Whereas the latter attitude puts all stress on
the injury caused to the weak by the cupidity of those who succeed in
monopolizing all the resources, and on the disorder and confusion brought
about by the lack of general direction; the former maintains that
State-guaranteed social security would take away all incentive to exertion-the
fear of poverty and the hope of gain and distinction- and thus cause a
lowering of vitality and a weakening of all productive effort, in addition to
the stifling of freedom by centralized regimentation. At bottom the whole
debate centres round the question of human nature: could man be so
re-educated in a socially integrated system as to begin to act on motives
different from those prevailing in the competitive system ? Is the urge for
free economic initiative nothing else than rationalized greed or anxiety,
bound to die out in an order guaranteeing equal economic well-being, as the
Collectivist ideology teaches ? It has been shown that eighteenth-century
thinkers, while holding fast to the idea of a rational, not to say
scientific, system of society, I fought shy of the latter conception of the
social-economic problem, which would appear to have been inherent in the
postulate of the natural order. Jacobinism may be regarded as the eighteenth
century attitude on trial. The Jacobin inhibitions on the subject of property
and their reluctance to face the social-economic issue on their own general
premises were the main cause for the Utopian, mystical character of their
vision of the final social order as the reign of virtue. In a sense the
evolution of Jacobin thinking on the question of property throughout the
Revolution would appear as a gradual liberation from inhibitions, effected
under the impact of events, and leading to a total liberation in those
post-Thermidorian Jacobins and Robespierrists who joined the plot of Babeuf,
and reinterpreted the idea ofthe natural order into terms of economic
communism. The Jacobins were not abreast with the masses in the Revolution.
Carried away by the idea of the rights of man and the Revolutionary hope of
salvation, and exasperated by famine and shortage, the masses confusedly and
passionately clamoured that the Revolution should carry out its promises,
that is to say, should make them happy. However anarchical and crude the
agitation of the Enrages under the leadership ofJacques Roux and Varlet,
however naive the socialism of such pamphleteers as Dolivier, Lange of Lyons,
Momoro and others, the whole social movement in the Revolution derived from
the Messianic expectation engendered by the idea of the natural order, and
went beyond the spasmodic social protest and the clamour for instant relief.
But these agitators, with or without a programme, successful or not as
spokesmen of pressure groups, did not make policies. The Revolution was
steered by the Jacobins at the vital period. ~ Their whole thinking dominated
by the idea of a rational and natural order, the Jacobins were most reluctant
to yield to the view that there was an inconsistency between a rational
political-ethical system and free economics. The Revolution forced upon them
lessons against their own grain. There was a definite social dynamism in the
idea of unlimited popular sovereignty. The poor were the vast majority ofthe
nation, and thus entitled to dictate conditions to the small minority ofthe
rich. The issue received a definite social complexion with the exclusion
ofthe poor from the active political life of the nation. It created the
consciousness and sealed the fact of conflict. Moreover, owing to
reminiscences of antiquity, the democratic popular ideal was always
associated with the social radicalism of the great legislators of ancient
Greece and Rome, Lycurgus, Solon, the Gracchi, with the abolition of debts
owed to landlords, redistribution of land, and in general the rule of the
poor over the rich. Moral asceticism had always glorified the austere virtues
of the poor, and condemned the vices of wealth. The fact also was that as
soon as the feudal system was abolished and the rule of wealth affirmed, the
propertied classes, the bourgeoisie and the richer peasantry, having well
benefited from the sale of confiscated Church property, began to wish for a
halt to the Revolution. They felt their property and their new gains in
danger of attack Fom Revolutionary dynamism. While they were turning against
the Revolution, the Revolution was becoming more and more identified with the
poor and propertyless, above all in the mind of Robespierre. And yet, the
Jacobin attitude remained ambiguous and inconsistent to the end. The
incongruities in it were only finally resolved in Babouvism. And so almost
ironically the chain of laws and decrees which led to the establishment of an
economic dictatorship, which violated every principle of private property and
free economics, was started by the Convention on March I8th, 1793, with the
unanimous vote of the death penalty against anyone proposing the lot agrafre
or any plan " subversive of landed, commercial and industrial property
". As late as November, 1792, Saint-Just proclaimed in his famous and
most gloomy speech on Supplies his dislike of " lois violentes sur le
commerce ". He came out firmly ~ favour of free trade, and suggested
that the Convention should place freedom of trade " sons le sauvegarde
du people meme ", although he made the reservation that unrestricted economic
liberty " une tres grande verite en these generate ", may require
some reinterpretation in the context of the evils of Revolution. There was
also the necessity of teaching virtue to a people demoralized by the crimes
of the Monarchy. A year and four months later, on February 26th, 1794 (8
Vent6se, an II), Saint-Just made the meaningful statement that in the social
domain the force of circumstances was leading the Revolution " a des
resultats aux-quels nous n'avons pas tense ". He was proposing the confiscation
of all the possessions of the suspects and their distribution to the poor on
the ground that the right to property was conditional on political loyalty.
In the last few months or weeks before their downfall the Robespierrists
began dimly and reluctantly to perceive that their rational and final system,
to have any meaning and to last, must carry with it a correspondmg
change-over in the social and economic conditions. And so on the very eve of
his execution (7 Thermidor, July pith, 1794)

Saint-Just coupled together in a flicker of comprehension the idea ofthe
Institutions with a Revolutionary social programme: " creel des
institutions civiles et renverser ['empire de la richesse ". But as will
be shown, even in this resolve there were inherent reservations that were
calculated to vitiate the general postulate. (b) CLASS Policy Political
rather than social considerations gave rise to Jacobiu class orientation.
Thus Saint1ust arrived at the conclusion that the Revolution was menaced by a
fatal contradiction between the Revolutionary form of government and social
realities. He dis. covered that the wealth of the nation was to be found in
the may in the hands of the enemies of the Revolution. The working people,
the real supporters of the new regime, depended for their existence on their
enemies. The interests of the two classes being irreconcilable, the outcome
could only be a class policy favouring the class supporting the Republic, and
carried out at the expense of the possessors of wealth. To Saint-Just such a
policy came to mean the realization of democracy. Robespierre's thinking
evolved in a similar way. His famous Catechism opens with the question,
" What is our aim? " As answer is-the execution ofthe Constitution
in favour ofthe people " Who are the enemies ? " The answer is-the
vicious and the rich, who are the same. To the question on the possibility of
union of the popular interest and the interest of the rich and (their)
government, Robespierre gives the laconic answer " never ". Th last
question and answer was crossed out by the Incorruptible, be the very fact of
it having beenjotted down shows where his though were wandering. In another
of Robespierre's notes we read that all internal dangers came from the
bourgeoisie. In order to defeat the bourgeoise " il faut rallier le
people ". The people must be paid and maintained at the expense of the
rich: paid for attendance at public assemblies, armed and maintained as
Revolutionary are out of special levies on the rich whom they were to watch,
finally subsidized and provided for by the Government at the expense of the
producers and merchants. These were the premises ofthe economic dictatorship
which came into being alongside the political terrorist dictatorship in 1793,
and to the emergence of which Rotespierre and Saint-Just made a substantial
contribution, although in a way only yielding to the violent pressure of the
Enrages and the inescapable necessities of the situation: war, inflation and
economic disintegration. The first series of decrees were issued on May 4th,
1793, after the assembly of Paris mayors and municipal officers had declared
the people in " a state of revolution " till supplies had been
secured, and demanded fixed prices for corn and what amounted to an abolition
of the corn trade, in so far as mediation between producers and consumers was
concerned. The decrees of the Convention ordered producers to make
declarations on their produce, under penalty of confiscation. Private houses
and stores were opened to search. Corn and flour were to be sold only on the
public market. A " prix maximum " was fixed. A forced loan of a
milliard francs, the first of the enforced loans and levies on the rich, was
launched. On July z7th, 1793, on a motion of Billaud-Varenne (his Elements de
Retpublicanisme deserve attention as an exposition of Jacobin social
philosophy alongside of Saint-Just's Institutions Republicaines), the
Convention voted the famous decree on the suppression of food speculation.
This law put an end to freedom of trade and secrecy of commerce in
practically all commodities except luxury articles. It was followed by a
decree on the greniers d'ahondance, which fumed all bakers into State
employees, although it failed to build up the State granaries. On September
28th came the law on the " general maximum ", fixing prices of all
commodities and wages, to be supplemented, at least in Paris, by a system of
rationing. In forcing sellers to sell at a loss, and without compensation,
the law was no less a class measure than the progressive tax, the forced
loans, the special levies on, and requisitions from, the rich, all designed
to pay for the war and to maintain the poor. More than that, it was
calculated to reduce small tradespeople and artisans to the position of wage
earners. In fact, on I5 Floreal a decree was passed allowing for the
mobilizing of all engaged in the production and circulation of goods of prime
necessity. Penalties were provided for shirkers as guilty of conspiracy. On
October wand, the three-man Commission des Subsistances was appointed to take
over the economic dictatorship of the whole of France, and to put an end to
the alleged sabotage and incompetence of the local authorities, who had been
in charge of the execution of the economic decrees till then. From this there
was only one step to the nationalization of industries.

The idea was not indeed quite absent from the minds of thol responsible
for the social policies of the Revolution. So Chaumet~ urged the Convention
" to concentrate its attention on raw material and factories, in order
tO place them under requisition by fixing penalties for those holding or
manufacturing goods who allow therr to be idle; or even to place them at the
disposal of the Republic which has no lack of labour to turn them all to a
useful purpose " As a Representative of the people on mission Saint-Just
displayed an example of dictatorial action and class policy at their highest
He would order houses of speculators, defaulters against the " maximum
" and hoarders to be razed to the ground, he would| requisition in eight
days s,ooo pairs of shoes and 15,000 shirtl (" dechaussez tons les
aristocrates "), order the Mayor of Strasbour: to deliver on the same
day IOO,OOO livres of the levy imposed uper| the rich for the benefit of the
poor patriots, war widows and w: orphans; he would have the richest
individual who had not paic his share of the nine million enforced loan
within twenty-four hot exposed on the guillotine for three hours; double and
treble th amount to be paid for any delay; seize in twenty-four hours z,oon
beds, requisition all overcoats, and so on.

(C) FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS ~ A class policy provoked by a Revolutionary and
war-tim emergency may be nothing more than an empirical ad hoc police and
need not entail deliberate and planned shaping of the social an economic life
in tote. There are, however, clear indications thy Robespierre and Saint-Just
felt themselves, however reluctantly, driven beyond such empiricism in the
direction of integral planning in accordance with a definite principle. Thus
in his speeches oil Supplies and on the Declaration of the Rights of Man
(I79;'. Robespierre made the emphatic distinction between the old we), and
the postulate of a new deal in the economic sphere, which would| correspond
to the great political change-over that had taken plea l Robespierre objected
to the approach of the Convention to tll problem, on the grounds that it
accepted as the highest authorill the contradictions and vagaries of former
royal ministers. Tl legislation of the first two Revolutionary Assemblies on
this sulk had been in the old style, because the interests and the prejuce
which were the basis oftheir policy had not changed. The defenders of hungry
citizens and the spokesmen of the poor were in the eyes of the earlier Assemblies
dangerous agitators and anarchists. The Assemblies and their governments
employed bayonets to calm alarms and to still famine. Their idea of
unrestricted freedom of commerce put a premium on bloodsucking. It was an
essentially incomplete system, because it had no bearing upon the "
veritable principle ". What was this principle ? ,It was that the
question of supplies must be considered not from the angle of commerce, that
is to say of the rich and the ruling classes, but from the point of view of
the livelihood of the people. The distinction is of capital importance. It
may make the difference between free economics and planned society. The
awareness of the necessity of a fundamental principle is what matters most
here. Thus in his speech on the Declaration, dealing this time not with trade
but with the more fundamental problem of private property, Robespierre
declared: " posons done de bonne foi les principes du droit de
propriety." It was the more necessary as prejudice and vested interest
had combined to spread a thick fog over the issue. It was in connection with
the social problem that Saint-Just declared that those who made Revolutions
by halves were digging their own graves, and spoke ofthe " quelques
coups de genie ", which were still needed to save the Revolution, to
make a " true Revolution and a true Republic ", and to render
democracy unshakable, and Robespierre admonished the Assembly to remember
that they were starting a new career on earth, " ou personne ne vous a
devances ". Reechoing Robespierre, Saint-Just spoke in the fragments on
the Republican Institutions of the need of a " doctrine which puts these
principles into practice and insures the well-being of the people as a whole
". He reached this conclusion from another angle as well. He had
realized the insufficiency of ethics and politics alone to insure a rational
order. The enthronement of Republican vertu must proceed on a par with social
and economic reform. These matters, he realized, " were analogous, and
could not be treated separately ". The French economy, shattered by
inflation and war, could not be stabilized, without the triumph of morality
over avarice. At the same time moral reform could not be initiated in an
atmosphere of general distress, and a pauper would never make a sel¿C
¿respecting proud citizen. " Pour reformer les mccurs il faut commencer
par i contenter les besoins et l'intere~t." The Revolution could never
be securely established as long as the poor and unhappy could be incited
against the new order. The fundamental principle postulated by the
Robespierrists referred to a postulate which was not concerned with the
expansion of economic activity and the increase of wealth-values not much in
favour with them, but with economic security for the nation, which in fact
came to mean the masses Robespierre declared that the wealth of a nation was
essentially common property, in so far as it supplied the pressing needs of
the people. Only the surplus may be considered as individual property, to be
disposed at will, speculated with, hoarded and monopolized From this point of
view food must be regarded as being outside the sphere of free trade, because
it concerned the people's right to and means of preserving their physical
existence. Freedom of trade in this case would be tantamount to the right of
depriving the people of their life: freedom of assassination. It mattered
little whether non-essential goods had a free market, were hoarded and sold
at a high price, for the lives of the people were not dependent on them It was
quite natural for Robespierre to reject the view that property was made
sacred and legitimate by the mere fact of its existence, its being
established and time-honoured. There was a need for a moral principle as a
basis for the idea ofproperty. Private property was not a natural right, but
a social convention. A declaration consecrating all established property as
natural would be a declaration in favour of speculators and the rich, and not
for man and the people. The right of property must at least (like the more
sacred, because natural, right to liberty) be restricted by the rights and
needs of others. Property is a right to enjoy and dispose of that portion of
the national wealth which is guaranteed by He law. Any possession or traffic
violating the security, liberty, existence and property of others is illicit
and immoral. The poor and propertyless had a sacred claim on society to a
livelihood in the form of employment-the 1848 right to work-or social
assistance. This was the debt the rich owed to the poor. This debt should be
shed through progressive taxation, which would also tend to level possessions
and income For as Robespierre had said in an early speech on the~right of
bequest, the Social Contract, far from promoting Inequality, must be designed
to counteract the tendency towards inequality and strive to restore by all
means natural equality. It is vital to realize that what was meant here was
not the right of the unfortunate pauper to charity and the duty of the
Government to come to his assistance, but the idea that the needs of the poor
were the focus and foundation stone of the social edifice. " The bread
given by the rich is bitter," declared Saint-Just. " It compromises
liberty; bread is due to the people by right in a wisely regulated
State." Economic dependence of man on man stands condemned. The State
must remove it. The State has the authority to employ, make changes and
dispose of all the goods and assets which make up the nation's wealth, if
private property is ultimately no more than a concession made by the State.
SaintJust threw out a number of slogans which were to become the catchwords
of Babeuf. " Les malheureux vent les puissances de la te r re, its ont
le droll de p arler en maitre s aux go uverne men t s qui les negligent."
The welfare of the poor was the primary task of government. " The
Revolution will not be fully accomplished as long as there is a single
unhappy person and pauper in the Republic." Very significantly
Saint-Just, usually the least cosmopolitan of the Revolutionary leaders,
strikes a solemnly propagandist note when dealing with the social problem.
" Que ['Europe apprenne que vous ne voulez plus un malheureux ni un
oppresseur sur le territoire fran,cais, que cet exemple fructifie sur la
terre, qu'il propage ['amour des versus et le bonheur ! Le bonheur est une
idee neuve en Europe !" This idea of happiness, seized upon by Babenf
and nineteenth-century successors of Jacobinism up to 1848, was in its decant
tone new and upon a totally different plane from the right to happiness of
Locke and the fathers of the American Constitution, as well as from the right
to social assistance recognized in the famous Report of the Duc de la
Rochefoucauld in the Constituent Assembly. Saint1ust introduced a new and
additional consideration to the analysis of the question of private property.
He added to Robespierre's moral and social arguments a political
consideration. The right to property, as said before, became for him
conditioned on political loyalty. One who had shown himself an enemy of his
country, that is to say a counter-revolutionary, had no right to possess
property. Only the man who had contributed to the liberation of the
fatherland had rights. The property of the patriots was sacred, but the
possessions of the conspirators " vent la , pour tons les malheureux
". The practical and immediate applica tion of this principle were
Saint1ust's famous lois de Ventose on the confiscation of the property of the
suspects and its distribution among the poor patriots, the carrying out of which
was prevented by the events of Thermidor, but which was designed to bring
about a vast transfer of property, indeed a social revolution. And yet, the
main feature of Jacobin thinking on the social problem was its lack of
coherence. The Jacobin attitude shows unmistakable signs of embarrassment
throughout. It has often been suggested that the more "socialist"
utterances of Robespierre and Saint-Just were mere lip service, designed to
counteract the agitation of the Enrages, and paid by men who were at heart
typical representatives of the bourgeoisie. This was not really the case.
Robespierre's statements expressing an anti-bourgeois class policy are to be
found in his confidential notes, not intended for publication. Words of
appeasement and reassurance directed to the possessing classes, in an
incidentally nonchalant and contemptuous tone, appear in Robespierre's public
utterances, but have no counterpart in his carpet. If a person's most genuine
sentiments are those which he keeps to himself, it follows that not
Robespierre's socialism but his conservatism is to be taken as an expression
of opportunism. This does not, however, exhaust the case. What is quite clear
is that neither Robespierre nor Saint1ust felt themselves to be part and
parcel of the proletarian class fighting for its liberation against the
propertied classes. On occasion Robespierre, it is true, could adopt a
vocabulary not far removed from the language of the Enrages: if the people
are hungry and persecuted by the rich, and can get no help from the laws
which are supposed to protect them, they are justified " in looking afta
themselves " against the bloodsuckers. He had nevertheless nothing but
words of condemnation for the tactics and temperament of the Enrages, "
who would cut the throat of any shopkeeper because he sells at high
prices". He considered them crazy anarchists and tools of a
counter-revolutionary conspiracy. The Robespierrist point of departure was
not class consciousness, but the idea of social harmony based on the egalitarian
conception of the rights of man. The aim was not the triumph of one class and
the subjugation of the other, but a people where class distinctions have
ceased to matter. The upper classes constituted a factor violating these
principles, and had therefore to be brought to their knees. The mass of the
people was thought to have no anti-social interests. It was virtuous and free
from hubris and the vices engendered by wealth. Hence, on the one hand, what
may be called the patronizing attitude of Robespierre and Saint-Just towards
the proletariat and, on the other, their anxiety not to drive things to a
breaking point. In a characteristic passage of a late speech, Saint1ust
expressed his impatient disapproval of people of the artisan and working
class who, instead of sticking to their jobs like their honest hard-working
fathers, had completely yielded to their passion for politics, were thronging
to public meetings and hunting for political jobs. In one of his last
speeches and some time after the promulgation of the Laws of Ventose,
Saint-Just urged upon the Convention the necessity of calming public opinion
on the question of the security of property, especially ecclesiastical and
emigre' property bought recently from the State. " It faut assurer tous
les droits, tranquilliser les acquisitions; it faut meme innover le mains
possible dans le regne des annuites pour empecher de nouvelles craintes, de
nouveaux troubles." Robespierre felt a good deal of embarrassment that
he, the moralist contemptuous of money, was being driven to make money appear
the decisive factor in the social order. In this embarrassment there was, of
course, also an element of fear, and a subconscious wish to evade the issue.
He reassured the " ames de bone ", the haves, that there was no need
for them to become alarmed for their property. The sans-cutoftes, following
eternal principles and not considering the " chetive merchandise "
a sufficiently lofty aim, did not ask for equality of goods, but only for an
equality of rights and an equal measure of happiness. Opulence was not only
the prize of vice, but its punishment. " L'opulence est une
infamie," said Saint-Just. The children of a righteous and poor
Aristides, brought up at the expense of the Republic, were happier than the
offspring of Crassus in their palaces, taught Robespierre. Robespierre feared
damning the propertied class as a whole, and without reprieve, for the sole
sin of owning wealth. What mattered was the disposition of a man. In the good
old tradition of Catholic homiletics Robespierre taught that a man may own
much wealth, and yet not feel rich. He opposed on occasion a motion whereby
members of the Convention would have to declare their fortune. He would not
agree that that was the final test of patriotism. The test was a lifelong
dedication to virtue and the people. Not even the visible signs of service,
such as taxes paid, and guards mounted-Pharisaic phylacteries-were the
criterion, but the disposition externalized in a general and continuous
attitude. A very elusive test indeed. On one occasion Robespierre declared
that " La Republique ne convient qu'au people, aux hommes de routes les
conditions, qui ont une ame pure et elevee, aux philosopher amis de
l'humanite, aux sansculottes ". He condemned the factions who had just
suffered their doom for having tried to frighten the bourgeoisie with the
spectre of the agrarian law and worked to separate the interests of the rich
from those of the poor, by presenting themselves as the protectors of the
poor. The ultimate test was virtue; only, while the people were virtuous
almost by nature (and definition), the rich must make a great effort.
Saint-Just endeavoured to give a more concrete meaning to virtue in the
social sense. He declared labour an integral part virtue, and idleness a
vice. There was, according to him, a direct relationship between the amount
of labour and the growth of liberty and morality in a country. The idle class
was the last support of the Monarchy: " promene ['ennui, la fureur des
puissances et le degout de la vie commune." It must be suppressed.
Everyone must be compelled to work. Those who do no work have no rights in a
Republic. " It faut que tout le monde travaille ct se respecte."
The postulate of a definite principle for the management of the economic life
of the nation voiced by Robespierre and Saint1ust, although suggesting an
effort at overall planning and direction by the State, turns Out to be
something very remote from State ownership of the means of production, or
collectivism. It envisages social security and the economic independence of
the individual, guaranteed and actively maintained by the State. It is a
mixture of restrictionism and individualism. It denies freedom of economic
expansion out of fear of inequality and out of asceticism, and l yet is
motivated by a secret wish to restore freedom of trade Robespierre rejected
complete equality of fortune quite emphatic ally as a chimera, and a
community of goods as an impracticable dream, running counter to man's
personal interest. The lot agraere was a phantom invented by the knaves to
frighten the fools The problem of social security was not to Saint-Just a
questio of the dole and charity, not even of pensions, but of legislation to'
prevent poverty. Man was not born for the alms-house, but to contented and
independent citizen. In order to be so, everyone ought to have land of his
own to till. Land should be provided for everyone, either through the
expropriation of the opponents of the regime, or from the large State domain
especially built up for the purpose. Only invalids should be placed in a
position of receiving charity. The duty of the State was to give to all
Frenchmen the means of obtaining the first necessities of life, without
having to depend on anybody or anything but the laws, " et sans
dependence mutuelle darts fetal civil". Security must be accompanied by
equality, it too enforced by the State with the help of restrictive laws.
There must be equality. There should be neither rich nor poor. A limit to the
amount of property owned by one person would have to be fixed. Only those
should be considered as citizens who possess nothing beyond what the laws
permit them to own. Excessive fortunes would be gradually curtailed by
special measures, and their owners would be compelled to exercise severe
economy. Indirect inheritance and bequests should be abolished. Everyone
should be compelled to stork. Idleness, hoarding of currency and neglect of
industry should be punished. Every citizen would, in the scheme of the
Institutions Republicaines, render an account every year in the cornInunal
Temple of the use of his fortune. He would not be interfered with unless he
used his income to the detriment of others. Gold and silver, except as money,
would never be touched in Saint-Just's Utopia. No citizen would be allowed to
acquire land, open banks or own ships in foreign countries. Austerity in food
and habits was to be observed. For instance, meat was to be forbidden on
three days of the decadi, and to children altogether up to the age of
sixteen. The public domain, at Rousseau's advice made as large as possible,
was to serve as a national fund to reward virtue and to compensate victims of
misfortune, infirmity and old age, to fmance education, to give allowances to
newly married couples and, as said before, to offer land to the landless.
" Land for everybody "-this, if anything, sums up the Jacobin
social ideal: a society of self-suff~cient small-holders, artisans and small
shopkeepers. The combination of a small plot of land and virtue would secure
happiness. Not the voluptuous happiness of Persepolis, but the bliss of
Sparta. " Nous vous offrimes le bonheur de Sparte et celui d'Athenes de
la vertu. . . de l'aisance et de la mediocrite . . . le bonheur qui nait de
la jouissance de necessaire sans superfluity . . . la haine de la tyrannic,
la volupte d'une cabana et d'un champ fertile cultive par vos mains . . . le
bonheur d'etre libre et tranquille, et de jouir en paix des fruits et des
mccurs de la Revolution; celui de retourner a la nature, a la morale et de
fond la Republique . . . une charrue, un champ, une chaumiere a l'ab~ de la
lubricite d'un brigand, voile le bonheur." Land ownership was in
Saint-Just's reactionary Utopian vision the sole guarantee of social
stability, personal independence and virtue. The reform envisaged in the Laws
of Ventose on the confiscation of the property of the suspects and its
distribution to poor patriots was to be a first step in the direction of an
overall reform designed to give land (or some property) to everyone. The
latter idea was formulated in the Institutions Republicaines written in
Pluviose, that is to say, before the Laws of Ventose. There is no reference
in the Institutions to the right to property being conditional on political
allegiance. It would therefore be legitimate to conclude that the Ventose
project was not merely another act of repression taken against the suspects
or an ad hoc demagogical measure designed I to take the wind out of the sails
of the Enrages, but was meant as a I part of a comprehensive social
programme. It was appreciated as such by contemporaries as well as by the
Babouvists. There is one aspect in Saint-Just's doctrine of " land for
everybody", which had failed to receive the attention it deserves, and
which goes to prove two important things. The first is the fact that however
Utopian and fanciful the plan, it originated at least partly in the realities
and difficulties of the hour, above all in the crisis in food supplies.
Secondly, on closer scrutiny the plan, while prima facie bearing the
character of a State-planned overall reform, turns out to be a policy
designed to create the conditions for free trade. This is the measure of
Jacobin inconsistencies and grave inner difficulties in the matter of
property and economics. The exposition of the reasons for the establishment
of a society of small-holders in the Institutions Re'publicaines begins with
the difficulties in the circulation of corn. Easy circulation is essential
where few owned property and few had access to raw materials In his
inveterate dislike of restrictions on trade and deep reluctance to accept the
fixing of" maximum" prices by the State, Saint-Just declared that
grain would not circulate where its price was fixed by the Government. If it
was " taxed " without a reform of conduct, avarice and speculation
would be the result. In order to reform .

I conduct, a start must be made to satisfy needs and interests. Everyone
must be given some land. Should there be a distribution of land on the lines
of a lot agra~re, on the principle that the State had the power to change all
property relations as it pleased ? No. Even the Laws of Ventose did not
contain an attack on the principle of private property as such, but made it
conditional only on political allegiance. Apart from his genuine faith in
private property, Saint-Just was too much of a responsible statesman, too
vitally interested in the success of the sale of national property and the
policy of assignats, the Revolutionary paper money, which had the national
property as its cover (ecclesiastic, emigre and other confiscated property)
and u pon which the fate of the regime depended, to frighten the potential
purchasers of national property into believing that their property was
insecure and might be taken away from them. But Saint-Just himself gives the
clue to his intentions in the famous sentence found among his papers: "
ne pas admettre partage des proprietes, mais le portage des fermages."
It appears that notwithstanding his desire that everyone should have some
landed property in order to be happy and free, the redistribution of land was
less important to him than its breaking up into small units of cultivation,
units not necessarily held as an inalienable property, but as " fermages
" on rent. The multiplicacion of such units seemed to Saint1ust the best
guarantee of the free circulation of grain and of its reasonable price. The
greater the number of sellers, the fewer the buyers, the better the supply,
the lower the price. This reasoning is already to be found in Mably, the
bitter opponent of free trade in grain, and in an article by Marat of
September sth, I79I, which must have influenced Saint-Just, and which reveals
striking similarities with Saint-Just's treatment of the subject. Marat
suggested that landowners should be forced to divide their large property
into small-holdings, without the Government resorting to the lot a~raire and
to a redistribution of land. Marat's explanation of his plan would probably
fill in the details of Saint-Just's thinking. Both seemed to be primarily
concerned with the actual crisis of supplies, and the problem of satisfying
the needs of the poorer classes. Neither of them liked the idea of keeping
prices down by the law of maximum, for such a law in the opinion of both was
calculated to ruin the producers and to discourage agriculture. A remedy was
to be found in the law of supply and demand. Since the price of a commodity
was determined by the proportion of buyers to sellers, it was essential to
multiply thee number of farmers. Many journeymen could be transformed into
small farmers. The number of sellers of agricultural produce would be
immensely increased, and the number of buyers proportionately diminished. A
healthy equilibrium and prosperity would be restored. Marat insisted that the
State and not the landowners should have the power to select the farmers.
State control I of leases was probably also envisaged by Saint-Just.
Moreover, Marat envisaged a very large State domain which would farm out to
landless peasants. In terms similar to those oq Saint1ust (about the
correlation between the social realities and the form of government) Marat
thought that his plan would bring the civil order nearer to the natural order
by a greater facility of cultivation and a more equal distribution of the
fruits of the land. In addition, it would re-establish the balance between
the price of food and the price of manufactured goods, and finally abolish
all monopoly in the fruits of the land. The more farmers there would be, the
fewer the journeymen, and thus the wages of the journeymen would increase. On
the other hand, the more farmers, the greater the competition in the sale of
produce. Furthermore, the people on the land, assured of their needs, would
be interested in getting the best value for their surplus " and the free
trade in corn would be restored by itself ". It was this freedom of
trade which most of the leaders of the Revolution were grieved to be
compelled to restrict, and which, finally, by devious ways and State
interference, they hoped to restore.

CONCLUSIONS Totalitarian democracy, far from being a phenomenon of recent
growth, and outside the Western tradition, has its roots in the common stock
of eighteenth-century ideas. It branched out as a separate and identifiable
trend in the course of the French Revolution and has had an unbroken
continuity ever since. Thus its origins go much further back than
nineteenth-century patterns, such as Marxism, because Marxism itself was only
one, although admittedly the most vital, among the various versions of the
totalitarian democratic ideal, which have followed each other for the last
hundred and fifty years. It was the eighteenth-century idea of the natural
order (or general will) as an attainable, indeed inevitable and all-solving,
end, that engendered an attitude of mind unknown hitherto in the sphere of
politics, namely the sense of a continuous advance towards denouement of the
historical drama, accompanied by an acute awareness of a structural and
incurable crisis in existing society. [his state of mind found its expression
in the totalitarian democratic Edition. The Jacobin dictatorship aiming at
the inauguration of F reign of virtue, and the Babouvist scheme of an
egalitarian communist society, the latter consciously starting where the former
left off, and both emphatically claiming to do no more than realize
eighteenth-century postulates, were the two earliest versions of modern
political Messianism. They not only bequeathed a myth and passed on practical
lessons, but founded a living and unbroken radiation. Totalitarian democracy
early evolved into a pattern of coercion and centralization not because it
rejected the values of eighteenth century liberal individualism, but because
it had originally a too perfectionist attitude towards them. It made man the
absolute point of reference. Man was not merely to be freed from restraints.
111 the existing traditions, established institutions, and social
arrangements were to be overthrown and remade, with the sole purpose Of
securing to man the totality of his rights and freedoms, and berating him
from all dependence. It envisaged man per se, ipped of all those attributes
which are not comprised in his Common humanity. It saw man as the sole
element in the natural order, to the exclusion of all groups and traditional
interests. T reach man per se all differences and inequalities had to be
eliminate And so very soon the ethical idea of the rights of man acquired the
character of an egalitarian social ideal. All the emphasis came be placed on
the destruction of inequalities, on bringing down privileged to the level of
common humanity, and on sweeping away all intermediate centres of power and
allegiance, when the social classes, regional communities, professional
groups or corporations. Nothing was left to stand between man and the State.
The power of the State, unchecked by any intermediate agencies, became
unlimited. This exclusive relationship between man and State plied
conformity. It was opposed to both the diversity wed goes with a multiplicity
of social groups, and the diversity result. from human spontaneity and
empiricism. In Jacobinism individualism and collectivism appear together for
the last time precarious<!l balanced. It is a vision of a society of equal
men re-educated the State in accordance with an exclusive and universal
patter Yet the individual man stands on his own economically. He con forms to
the pattern of the all-powerful State inevitably, but al; freely. Communist
Babouvism already saw the essence of freedom in ownership of everything by
the State and the use of public fort to ensure a rigidly equal distribution
of the national income, a' spiritual conformity. Man was to be sovereign. The
idea of men per se went together with the assumption that there was some
common point where men's wills would necessarily coincide. The corollary was
tendency to plebiscitary democracy. Men as individuals, and groups, parties
or classes, were called upon to will. Even partial was not the final
authority, for it was also a corporate body wit an interest of its own. The
only way of eliciting the pure general: will of men was to let them voice it
as individuals, and all at the; same time. -I It was impossible to expect all
men, especially those enjoying privileged position, to merge their
personalities immediately m common type of humanity. Unlimited popular
sovereignty Pa expected to offer to the unprivileged majority of the nation,
the is to say to men nearest the idea of man per se, the power to overrule
the minority of the privileged by vote, and if necessary by dire coercive
action. This conception of the sovereignty of the peon .

I was inspired not so much by the desire to give all men a voice and a
share in government as by the belief that popular sovereignty would lead to
complete social, political and economic equality. It regarded, in the last
analysis, the popular vote as an act of self identification with the general
will. This conception of popular sovereignty asserted itself as soon as it
began to be seen that the will of the majority would not necessarily be the
same as the general will. So the seemingly ultra-democratic ideal of
unlimited popular sovereignty soon evolved into a pattern of coercion. In
order to create the conditions for the expression of the general will the
elements distorting this expression had to be eliminated, or at least denied
effective influence. The people must be freed from the pernicious influence
of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, all vested interests, and even political
parties so that they could will what they were destined to will. This task
thus took precedence over the formal act of the people's willing. It implied
two things: the sense of a provisional state of war against the antipopular
cements, and an effort at re-educating the masses till men were able to will
freely and willingly their true will. In both cases the idea of free popular
self-expression was made to give place to the idea that the general will was
embodied in a w leaders who conducted the war with the help of highly
organized bands of the faithful: the Committee of Public Safety governing in
a Revolutionary manner with the help of the Jacobin clubs, and the Babouvist
Secret Directory supported by the Equals. In the provisional state of
Revolution and war, coercion was the natural method. The obedience and moral
support given by a unanimous vote bearing the character of an enthusiastic
acclamation became the highest duty. The suspension of freedom by the
legalized Violence of Revolution was to last till the state of war had been
replaced by a state of automatic social harmony. The state of war would go on
until opposition was totally eliminated. The vital Act is that the
Revolutionary suspension came to be regarded by the survivors and heirs of
Jacobinism and Babouvism as far from having come to an end with the fall of
Robespierre and the death of Babouf, and the triumph of the
counter-revolution. In their view the Revolution, although overpowered,
continued. It could not come to an end before the Revolutionary goal had been
achieved. The Revolution was on, and so was the state of war. So long as the
struggle lasted the vanguard of the Revolution was free from all allegiance
to the established social order. They were the trusted of posterity and as
such were justified in employing whatever mean`' were necessary to the
inauguration of the Millennium: subversion I when in opposition, terror when
in power. The right to Revolution I and the Revolutionary (provisional)
dictatorship of the proletariat I (or the people) are two facets of the same
thing. Extreme individualism thus came full circle in a collections pattern
of coercion before the eighteenth century was out. AU t' elements and
patterns of totalitarian democracy emerged or were outlined before the turn
of the century. From this point of view the contribution of the nineteenth
century was the replacement of the individualist premises of totalitarian
democracy by franld collectivist theories. The natural order, which was
originally conceived as a scheme of absolute justice immanent in the general
wit of society and expressed in the decisions of the sovereign people was
replaced by an exclusive doctrine regarded as objectively am scientifically
true, and as offering a coherent and complete answer to all problems, moral,
political, economic, historical and aesthetic Whether approved by all, by a
majority, or by a minority, d' doctrine claimed absolute validity. The
struggle for a natural and rational order of society soon came to be
considered as a conflict between impersonal and amoral historic forces rather
than between the just and the unjust. This tendency was confirmed by the
increasing centralization of political and economic life in the nineteenth
century. The organization o' men in the mass made it far easier to think of
politics in terms o. general movements and disembodied tendencies. Nothing
could be easier than to translate the original Jacobin conception of a
conflict endemic in society, between the forces of virtue and those of
selfishness, into the Marxist idea of class warfare. Finally, tub Jacobin and
Marxist conceptions of the Utopia in which history W2' destined to end were
remarkably similar. Both conceived it a. complete harmony of interests,
sustained without any resort to form although brought about by force-the
provisional dictatorship As a conquering and life-sustaining force political
Messianism spent itself in Western Europe soon after 1870. After the Commune,
the heirs of the Jacobin tradition abandoned violence and began to compete
for power by legal means. They entered parliaments and governments and were
incorporated by degrees into the life of the democracies. The Revolutionary
spirit now spread east wards until it found its natural home in Russia, where
it received a new intensity from the resentment created by generations of
oppression and the pre-disposition of the Slavs to Messianism. Its forms were
modified in the new environment, but no entirely new patterns of thought or
organization were created in Eastern Europe. lee vicissitudes of the
totalitarian democratic current in nineteenth century Western Europe and then
in twentieth-century Eastern Europe are intended to form the subject of two
further volumes of this study. The tracing of the genealogy of ideas provides
an opportunity for stating some conclusions of a general nature. The most
important lesson to be drawn from this inquiry is the incompatibility of the
idea of an all-embracing and all-solving creed with liberty. The two ideals
correspond to the two instincts most deeply embedded m human nature, the
yearning for salvation and the love of freedom. To attempt to satisfy both at
the same time is bound to result, if not in unmitigated tyranny and serfdom,
at least in the monumental hypocrisy and self-deception which are the
concomitants of totalitarian democracy. This is the curse on salvationist
creeds: to be born out of the noblest impulses of man, and to degenerate into
weapons of tyranny. An exclusive creed cannot admit opposition. It is bound
to feel itself surrounded by innumerable enemies. Its believers can never
settle down to a normal existence. From this sense of peril arise their
continual demands for the protection of orthodoxy by recourse to terror.
Those who are not enemies must be made to appear as fervent believers with
tee help of emotional manifestations and engineered unanimity at public
meetings or at the polls. Political Messianism is bound to replace empirical
thinking and free criticism with reasoning by definition, based on a priori
collective concepts which must be accepted whatever the evidence of the
senses: however selfish or evil the men who happen to come to the top, they
must be good and infallible, since they embody the pure doctrine and are the
people's government: in a people's democracy the ordinary competitive,
self-assertive and anti-social instincts cease as it were to exist: a
Workers' State cannot be imperialist by definition. The promise of a state of
perfect harmonious freedom to come after the total victory of the
transitional Revolutionary dictatorship represents a contradiction in terms.
For apart from the improbability-confirmed by all history-of men in power
divesting themselves of power, because they have come to think themselves
superfluous; apart from the fact of the incessant growth of centralize forms
of political and economic organization in the modern world making the hope of
the withering away of the State a chimera; the implication underlying
totalitarian democracy, that freedom could not be granted as long as there is
an opposition or reaction to fear, renders the promised freedom meaningless.
Liberty vail be offered when there will be nobody to oppose or differ-in
other words, when it will no longer be of use. Freedom has no meaning without
the right to oppose and the possibility to differ democratic-totalitarian misconception
or self-deception on this point is the reduction of absurdum of the
eighteenth-century rationalist idea of man; a distorted idea bred on the
irrational faith that the irrational elements in human nature and even "
different experience: of living " are a bad accident, an unfortunate
remnant, a temporal aberration, to give place-in time and under curing
influences-t some uniformly rational behaviour in an integrated society. The
reign of the exclusive yet all-solving doctrine of totalitarian, democracy
runs counter to the lessons of nature and history Nature and history show
civilization as the evolution of a multiplicity of historically and
pragmatically formed clusters of soci existence and social endeavour, and not
as the achievement of abstract Man on a single level of existence. With the
growth of the Welfare State aiming at social security the distinction between
the absolutist and empirical attitude a politics has become more vital than
the old division into capital). and social-security-achieving socialism. The
distinctive appeal ~ political Messianism, if we leave out of account the
fact of America laissez-faire capitalist creed, it, too, deriving from
eighteenth-century tenets, lies no more in its promise of social security,
but in its having become a religion which answers deep-seated spiritual
needs. The power of the historian or political philosopher to influence
events is no doubt strictly limited, but he can influence the attitude' of
mind which is adopted towards those developments. Like a psychoanalyst who
cures by making the patient aware of his sup conscious, the social analyst
may be able to attack the human urge which calls totalitarian democracy into
existence, namely the longing for a final resolution of all contradictions
and conflicts into a state of total harmony. It is a harsh, but none the less
necessary task t drive home the truth that human society and human life can
never state of repose. That imagined repose is another name for security
offered by a prison, and the longing for it may in a sense be an expression
of cowardice and laziness, of the inability to I face the fact that life is a
perpetual and never resolved crisis. All that can be done is to proceed by
the method of trial and error. This study has shown that the question of
liberty is indissolubly intertwined with the economic problem. The
eighteenth-century idea of a natural order, which originally shirked the
question of I a planned rational economic order, assumed full significance
and began to threaten freedom only as soon as it became married to the
postulate of social security. Is one therefore to conclude that economic
centralization aiming at social security must sweep away spiritual freedom ?
This is a question which the progress of economic centralization has rendered
most vital. This volume does not presume to answer it. Suffice it to point
out that liberty is less threatened by objective developments taking place as
it were by themselves, and without any context of a salvationist creed, than
by an exclusive Messianic religion which sees in these developments a solemn
fulfillment. Even if the process of economic centralization (with social
security as its only mitigating feature) is inevitable, it is important that
there should be social analysts to make men aware of the dangers. This may
temper the effect of the objective developments.